Re: Let's introduce ourselves

Hello everyone,
I recognize so many names here, it is great hearing all your publishing journey and everyones interest / commitment to improvement of EPUB and ultimately making EPUBs accessible for everyone, be that in developing the specifications, improving the reading experience from accessible reading systems, or getting access to the book via an accessible bookstores and libraries.

Currently living here in San Jose, California, I have been working in the publishing standards space for eight years now, and have over 25 years building accessible products from talking GPS systems which I invented as part of my undergraduate / graduate degree at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada, to a host of products at Benetech including Bookshare the worlds largest digital book repository of accessible books.  I am an a proud member of the Publishing Working Group, as well as on a number of working groups, task forces and community groups focused on the accessibility of digital materials.

For the past four years I have been working on our Global Certified Accessible (GCA) program<https://bornaccessible.benetech.org/global-certified-accessible/> where we are helping publishers and conversion vendors product truly born accessible EPUBs which conform to the Accessibility Conformance and Discovery Specification<https://www.w3.org/Submission/epub-a11y/>.

Thanks
EOM

Charles LaPierre
Principal, Accessibility Standards, and Technical Lead, Global Certified Accessible
Benetech
Twitter: @CLaPierreA11Y




On Mar 15, 2022, at 8:41 AM, Zheng Xu <zxu@gardenia-corp.com<mailto:zxu@gardenia-corp.com>> wrote:

Hi folks

Some of you might have noticed that I started to ask new joined members to introduce themselves shortly.

Actually I think maybe it's also a good time to introduce ourselves to new members and each other as well since the CG started to be active during covid and I think a lot of us did not know each other and might have missed some of the PCG meetings (which is totally fine).

Ok, I will run a quick introduction of myself.

My name is Zheng Xu. I am located in Ottawa (Canada) and founder of Gardenia Corp (a digital reading system firm).
I joined PCG because I hope I could help with prototyping new reading experiences, test new concepts and most importantly - make them into a real product or spec to benefit digital book readers.


Cheers,
Zheng