RE: Let's introduce ourselves

Hello everyone,

It is great to know about all of you!
I am Avneesh Singh, I am chairing/leading Accessibility task force in Publishing CG, as well as in EPUB 3 WG. I have been driving accessibility in publishing standards from IDPF days, and now continuing it in W3C. I also participate in Bureau of Indian standards and accessible publishing related activities in ISO.

My prime focus is on accessibility in publishing, and it is worth conveying that I am not obsessed for any specific format!

Knowing my high focus on accessibility, it would not be surprising to know that I am from DAISY Consortium, working as Chief of Strategy and Operations. DAISY consortium is a non-profit with members and partners spread in more than 90 countries. We pioneered first international specification for digital talking books in late 1990s, and since then we have achieved “gold accessibility” in digital publications with rich mark-up, audio books, braille and more.

A decade ago, many of us incorporated the accessibility principles established by DAISY in EPUB for making it accessible. I had witnessed the gold accessibility of DAISY transitioning to moderate/essential accessibility of EPUB 3 publications, but with the benefit that this moderate accessibility is available in huge volumes, initializing the era of born accessible publications!

I love to see this progress leading us to the world where we overcome these trade-offs and the gold accessibility is available in even higher volumes! It may happen through new publishing formats, or may be evolution of EPUB 3, or may be by adapting native web technologies for publishing use cases.

Looking forward to working with all of you for making information and knowledge accessible to everyone!

With regards
Avneesh Singh

Received on Friday, 18 March 2022 05:46:15 UTC