Re: Welcome to the Publishing Community Group

Hi everyone,
Thank you, Gautier, for the warm welcome.
I come from a mixed background in screen and media, writing, and publishing. I completed an Advanced Diploma in Screen and Media, followed by a BA in Professional Writing and Publishing at Curtin University, with a focus on editing and publishing workflows. Writing and publishing remain long-term priorities for me.
Outside of my publishing interests, I currently work in a technical role, but I’ve recently become more engaged with EPUB and open publishing standards as a reader and practitioner. Through exploring library-based e-book lending (e.g. Libby) and EPUB-based reading systems, I became interested in how open standards support interoperability, accessibility, and reader choice.
I recently spent time reading the EPUB 3.4 specification in detail and noticed that Media Overlays, in particular, are conceptually strong but widely misunderstood and under-adopted. In practice, Media Overlays, SMIL, and text-to-speech are often conflated — even in standards discussions — despite serving different roles and having very different guarantees.
That gap between specification intent, real-world publishing use cases, and implementation reality is what motivated me to start contributing proposals in this area. My current focus is on clarifying Media Overlays as synchronized, publisher-provided narration; separating them cleanly from synthetic speech/TTS; and exploring how clearer baselines and simpler serialization models could improve tooling, validation, and interoperability without expanding scope or introducing new rendering behavior.
I’m looking forward to participating in discussions within the Community Group and to learning from others’ experience across publishing, tooling, and reading-system implementation.
Best regards,

Heath Luke Sims

________________________________
From: Gautier Chomel EDRLab <gautier.chomel@edrlab.org>
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2025 9:40 PM
To: sims39@hotmail.com <sims39@hotmail.com>
Cc: Publishing Community Group <public-publishingcg@w3.org>; Wolfgang Schindler <ws.schindler@googlemail.com>
Subject: Welcome to the Publishing Community Group

Dear Heath Sims,
a warm welcome to our W3C Publishing Community Group! We're glad that you have joined us!

We're a friendly community where we offer lively discussions about diverse issues in electronic publishing. Besides the plenary session, we have task forces where all colleagues with a special interest in a certain topic join in investigating it in more detail during regular online sessions. Currently, there are 3 active task forces<https://w3c.github.io/publishingcg/#active-task-forces>, namely the Accessibility TF (A11Y), the Anti-Counterfeiting TF and the Fixed Layout-Accessibility TF (FXL-A11Y). If another topic would gain sufficient traction among our members, we may easily set up a further task force.

It would be nice if you could just give us some information on your background, your experiences and your interests and if you like, also any topics you would like to discuss with us.

Have a nice day!
Best regards

Gautier Chomel
Head of Accessibility & Quality Management
European Digital Reading Lab<http://www.edrlab.org/> | +33 6 77 32 96 98 | Schedule short meeting<https://calendar.app.google/wDrEGetrh5JK2NH3A>