Comments from DAISY Consortium, George Kerscher

Dear Thierry Michel,

As the AC representative from DAISY, I would like to provide some
comments that have been reviewed by some key people in the DAISY
Consortium.

As background, the DAISY Consortium participated in the work of SMIL 1
and presented the concept of the Digital Talking Book (DTB).  We based
our standards on SMIL and HTML. We demonstrated full text synchronized
with the human digital recording. In those early meetings, the DTB was
considered an important application of SMIL. Developers at these
meetings said that it would be very straightforward to include this
functionality in many of their products.  It is disappointing to see a
divergence on how text is being synchronized in SMIL applications. For
this reason, we feel it is very important that the work of Timed Text
proceed. We also feel that reference to the work of the DAISY Consortium
and Digital Talking Books be mentioned in the background information
provided.

The Digital Talking Book is one of the major implementations of SMIL and
Timed Text in the world. More than 30,000 titles have been produced
using the DAISY recommendations. In addition, further work has taken
place through the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in
the USA, and an advanced specification using SMIL 2 and XML has been
approved by ANSI and NISO. This is the ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2002, which
became a USA standard in  March of 2002. In addition to the use of Timed
Text, a sophisticated navigation system is described for the exploration
of DTB, that can also be applied to other multimedia based technology.

To answer the questions directly:

A. Milestones -- Please include the formalization of Timed Text as it
applies to the Digital Talking Book. We would like to see this generally
supported in applications.

This should be a straight forward application in the Timed Text
architecture.

B. The DAISY Consortium www.daisy.org, and the NISO Committee
www.loc.gov/nls/z3986 are organizations actively working in the area of
Timed Text. 
More than 50 separate organizations are involved with this work.

C. Yes, we are committed to this.

Best
George

George Kerscher, Senior Officer, Accessible Information
Recording For the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D)
http://www.rfbd.org
Project Manager to the DAISY Consortium
http://www.daisy.org
Chair Open eBook Forum (OeBF)
http://www.openebook.org
Co-chair WAI Steering Counsel
http://www.w3.org/wai
Email: kerscher@montana.com
Phone: +1 406/549-4687

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2002 15:30:41 UTC