collaboration and future plans

Gerardo et al:

Thanks for explaining to others what ePub is, in case they don't 
know, but I assure you that *I* do.

I used to work for the DAISY Consortium and was quite heavily 
involved in the development of both that spec and in IDPF's 
standards-making activities. In fact, I have worked for Benetech, so 
I'm quite familiar with the organization, where its strengths and 
weaknesses are, and its trajectory of receiving many tens of millions 
of Federal dollars over the last several years. I've been in the 
ebook and Web accessibility business for well over a decade, so I'm 
also quite familiar with Google's, and by extension Raman's, 
activities in this arena.

Again, I look forward to seeing contributions from this community 
group, working in collaboration with others as quickly as possible, 
in order to improve worldwide accessibility of SVG and making it 
interactive -- that means on the Web, in ebooks, and everywhere that 
makes sense.

That means access to data, diagrams, and whatever else SVG can help 
to present accessibly.

Unfortunately, Doug's projected timing, as he outlines in another 
message (in the original "STEM" thread), is unlikely to work for me, 
as things stand now, but as I said, I'll stick around to do what I 
can, when there's something to do.

I'd hoped that at least the support note could be updated (as a first 
step), without tests. But perhaps that's not possible. That note is 
*so* old that it doesn't look good for anyone who wants even to *try* 
to do the right thing, right now. If I could have rewritten it by 
myself (when I saw in June how outdated it was), I surely would have.

Generally speaking, as I've observed a number of these W3C community 
groups, it's ideal to "strike while the iron's hot."  Hopefully, the 
fire can be re-lit when the time is right.

In the meantime, I'll continue to make connections to this group, as 
I see them. In my experience, there is a lot of duplication of effort 
in the accessibility business, so that's why I wanted to be sure that 
these two community groups were connected. Thanks, Mark, for joining 
in with the "haptic" perspective.

Jennifer

Received on Saturday, 19 October 2013 15:40:58 UTC