Re: Active lobbying: Math

​Re the case to the SUITS - legal liability for accessible content already
exists in K-12 and it's widely seen as coming soon for HE and beyond.
Regardless, since the liability lies with institutions that are customers
of the publishers they are requiring accessible content up front and
adoptions can and have been lost when accessibility requirements aren't met
sufficiently. So there's plenty of incentive for publishers, we just need
to extend that to the platforms.​

Good news/spoiler alert: IDPF has nailed down dates for "EPUB Week"
including EPUB 3.1 launch and a Readium day Oct. 7-9. I've been discussing
the need for a publishers forum around EDUPUB with Bill McCoy and Pearson
will be hosting that in our NYC office the evening of Oct. 6. Audience will
be the SUITS not the geeks with the goal of agreement on the kind of joint
statement I outlined earlier.

Hopefully this will be successful and hopefully it will be one of many
lobbying efforts that create critical mass of pressure/incentive to get the
platforms on board.

Stay tuned.

*Paul*
-- 
Paul Belfanti
Director, Content Architecture
Core Platforms & Enterprise Architecture
office: +1 201-236-7746
mobile: +1 201-783-4884


On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 11:51 AM, Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>
wrote:

> +1
>
>
>
> Picking up on both Paul's comment—"signal their intent to publish content
> in these standards _*at volume*_"—and Ivan's—"after all we are all geeks
> and not suits"—clearly we need a SUITS FOR MATHML movement!!! ;-)
>
>
>
> Seriously, though. . . . It is so easy for the suits to say "yeah, of
> course the geeks want this, the geeks want everything. I've got a business
> to run."
>
>
>
> Suits need numbers. Preferably preceded by glyphs like $, €, £, ¥, etc.
>
>
>
> I'm not saying that will be easy to come up with. But here's an anecdote
> from my personal experience:
>
>
>
> --I have always been an advocate of MathML. But I'm an idealist and
> standards maven.
>
>
>
> --Ditto for accessibility.
>
>
>
> --Even so, when I was asked to lead the AAP EPUB 3 Implementation work a
> year or two ago, I have to admit I was surprised and puzzled to see MathML
> keep rising to the top of the priorities. "Really?" I thought. "How many
> publishers even publish math?" [Note that my reaction was more suit-like
> than geek-like. So now you know that the reason you more often see me in a
> suit than a t-shirt. In fact I can pretty much guarantee you've never seen
> me in a t-shirt.]
>
>
>
> --So in my work with that AAP initiative, I was talking to a key guy at
> the American Printing House for the Blind, who put some numbers, with one
> of those glyphs in front of them, in front of me. "Bill, when a student in
> a class needs a math book, it can take six months and $50,000 to get that
> book accessible for her. [A legal obligation, btw.] By which time the class
> is over. If the math in that book had been MathML it would have cost a
> small fraction of that and we could have gotten the book to her quickly.
> There are hundreds of books like that."
>
>
>
> --"Shit!!!" I thought. "Now I get it!"
>
>
>
> Of course now we are off in an even more remote corner of the world, from
> the suit's point of view: a book _*with math*_ for a tiny percent of the
> potential readers of that book. And the suits that are exposed to the legal
> liability are not the Publisher Suits, they're the University Suits.
>
>
>
> That's the challenge we have. I am not trying to be Debby Downer here; I'd
> like to be just the opposite.
>
>
>
> But for SUITS FOR MATHML to succeed, we need a way to say "this makes
> business sense, it's costing money and creating a dangerous legal liability
> to not have this problem solved, and I am going to [in Paul's words] make
> MathML available in volume [in the case of Publisher Suits; or] I am going
> to make a commitment of staff and resources to help solve this problem [in
> the case of University Suits] if I can see that this problem is being
> adequately addressed by the industry."
>
> We need to move beyond shame and conscience, unfortunately. That hasn't
> worked. So again, to +1 Paul and Ivan, we need to get commitments, and we
> need to get those commitments from the suits.
>
>
>
> --Bill Kasdorf
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Belfanti, Paul [mailto:paul.belfanti@pearson.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, August 21, 2015 10:25 AM
> *To:* Deborah Kaplan
> *Cc:* Ivan Herman; W3C Digital Publishing IG
> *Subject:* Re: Active lobbying: Math
>
>
>
> I think one important step would be for a broad range of stakeholders to
> issue joint *public* statements in support of MathML and EDUPUB and
> signal their intent to publish content in these standards *at volume*.
> This will create both business certainty and opportunity for those who can
> properly play/display this content and create competitive dynamic to
> support rich, accessible content.
>
>
> *Paul*
> --
> Paul Belfanti
> Director, Content Architecture
> Core Platforms & Enterprise Architecture
> office: +1 201-236-7746
> mobile: +1 201-783-4884
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Deborah Kaplan <
> dkaplan@safaribooksonline.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, Ivan Herman wrote:
>
> Yes, if we can actively lobby, with the weight of the publishing market
> behind us, to have browser vendors implement a particular feature, that
> would be a win. For everybody. And that should indeed be the topic of our
> discussions, too.
>
>
> (see changed subject line)
>
> I am hijacking this thread because of this comment by Ivan. This is great
> to hear that you feel this way, Ivan. And in that case, given that it is a
> truth universally acknowledged in this IG that native browser and reading
> system support for MathML would be a big win for the publishing sector, how
> would we go about designing and presenting that case, and then going on to
> actively lobby for the vendors to implement it?
>
> Deborah
>
>
>