Google’s Fast Flip Deal Has a Familiar Ring

The years-long tug of of war between publishers and Google has become familiar. Publishers complain that Google makes money off their backs and want to be paid for their content. Google replies that what it does — indexing the Web, offering search tools that allow people to find content — is not only perfectly legal, but also benefits publishers.

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Technical guidelines for Open XML accessibility implementation are available on http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2007/07/02/Accessibility_of_Open_XML.aspx

AIA - Accessibility Interoperability Alliance
*       A coalition of leading information and assistive technology companies, including Microsoft, have formed  the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), an engineering working group dedicated to enabling developers to more easily create accessible software, hardware and Web products.
*       Microsoft’s partnership with AIA will bring unified industry action to create greater interoperability will stimulate the development of increased innovation around accessibility.
*       AIA brings together accessible technology leaders from IT, AT, Web, test, and tool companies to address the complexity of developing accessible products and improving interoperability to provide more choices
*       AIA’s collective experience and expertise will result in a broader array of market-driven accessible technology solutions that are interoperable, innovative and flexible

Accessible technology enables individuals to adjust their computers to meet their needs (i.e. visual, hearing, dexterity, cognitive, and speech needs); including accessibility options built into products as well as specialty hardware and software products enabling greater interaction with technology.

*       Why Accessibility Matters
a.      Technology solutions that are accessible to everyone and adapt to each person’s unique needs are essential - providing accessible technology eliminates barriers for people with disabilities.   Over 74.2 million computer users in the United States alone would likely or very likely benefit from the use of accessible technology due to having mild-severe difficulties/impairments (Source: Microsoft commissioned study, conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., 2003).  Specifically:
i.      40% (51.6 million) of computer users are likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to mild difficulties/impairments.
ii.     17% (22.6 million) of computer users are very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to severe difficulties/impairments
b.      Businesses today need technology solutions to empower and retain employees - accessible technology is instrumental in meeting this need.  With over 101 million working age adults (ages 18-64) in the United States experiencing mild to severe difficulty/impairment (Source: Study commissioned by Microsoft, conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., 2003), accessible technology allows businesses to do the following:
i.      Retain current employees experiencing mild-severe difficulty/impairment
ii.     Expand their recruitment pool of candidates
iii.    Enhance team collaboration and communication among all employees - including those with disabilities

c.      Today’s digital world requires technology users have access to and the ability to share and archive information.  Users, with and without mild-severe difficulties/impairments want to share documents for business and personal purposes, regardless of the technology platform or software application being used, and want to be able to store and archive those documents so that access to the information contained in them can take place well into the future - open document formats, such as Open XML,  provide a rich infrastructure and community of developers that create the  applications for people with disabilities.

*       Interoperability and Accessibility
a.      Users have an expectation that being able to share documents “just happens.” They want to be able to use different documents on different platforms and applications.  With multiple document formats in existence today, interoperability becomes the technical context by which document sharing and data transfer between documents “just happens.” Use of a single document format on multiple platforms and with multiple applications is promoted through the widespread availability of that format.  This is achieved through that format being documented and the intellectual property needed to work with it being made available for widespread use.
b.      For technology users with mild-severe difficulties/impairments, these advantages are already being seen in Open XML solutions like the DAISY translator and Juke Dox.  Moreover, incredibly accessible sets of productivity applications like Microsoft Office 2007 use the Open XML formats today.
c.      Where users want to work with multiple formats and move data between them, they look to translation technologies.  Translators are technical tools that are easy to use because they create an effective bridge between formats.  This enables collaboration between users that for whatever reason choose to use different formats, and it further enhances access to the data.

d.      Microsoft recently announced its intent to work with the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), a new engineering working group dedicated to making it easier for developers to create software, hardware and Web-based products that are accessible to people with disabilities. (AIA is an engineering collaboration between assistive technology vendors, IT companies, and key NGOs).

e.      Founding members of AIA include information technology companies such as Adobe, BayFirst Solutions LLC, Microsoft and Novell Inc.; hardware companies such as HP; and assistive technology companies such as Claro Software Ltd., Dolphin Computer Access, GW Micro Inc., HiSoftware Inc., Madentec Inc., Texthelp Systems Inc. and QualiLife. Leading nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may also participate and share their expertise on these and future AIA projects. More information about the AIA can be found at http://www.AccessInteropAlliance.org.

f.      The founding members of the AIA have selected four projects to begin their work:
*       *       i.      Consistent keyboard access. Developing a set of keyboard shortcuts to provide consistent behavior to users of assistive technology products in any Web browser
*       *       ii.     Interoperability of accessibility APIs. Modifying and/or extending existing accessibility models (Microsoft UI Automation, IAccessible2 and others) to improve the interoperability and exchange of information between IT and assistive technology (AT) products
*       *       iii.    UI Automation extensions. Adding features and capabilities to support additional rich document scenarios, address new Web scenarios and more.
*       *       iv.     Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (ARIA) mapping through UI Automation. Designing the mapping of rich Web accessibility information through UI Automation to ensure maximum value for AT products and, therefore, for people with disabilities

*       Open XML and Accessibility -
a.      Open XML provides a rich infrastructure for creating content that meets the needs by people with disabilities and enables them to read, create, and edit documents with access to the semantics captured by document creators.  In addition to the accessibility support that was present in the first version of the specification, specific work was done to ensure that Open XML met the needs of users with disabilities and could provide the level of support needed in a document format.   Examples of modifications that were made in response to feedback from experts in the field and general comments include:
i.      The ability to associate content controls and form controls to specific labels
ii.     Improving support for defining navigation order
iii.    Working with data cells and headers in complex tables
iv.     Associating accessibility information with frames and framesets including the addition of a lone description element

*       Solution Examples

EXAMPLE: DAISY
a.      The aim of this Open XML to DAISY XML translator project is to enable blind and visually impaired users to save text files created within the world’s most widely used word-processing program into the world’s most broadly adopted accessible, enriched format.  The resulting “Save as DAISY” feature in Microsoft Office Word will provide for a translation from a WSIWYG document to a logical, semantically-rich construction that is the heart of a DAISY reading experience.
b.      Microsoft’s “Save as DAISY” is the first step toward bringing alternative, enhanced forms of multimedia into mainstream publishing.   For example:
i.      The scale of Microsoft Office Word will result in exponential increases in available DAISY content and make the conversion process considerably less complex than in the past by integrating the translation into a process users are familiar with, just saving as DAISY.
ii.     Publishers will be able to offer audio versions of books like encyclopedias or reference books which require more sophisticated navigation than simply reversing and fast forwarding.
iii.    Senior citizens will be able to choose an accessible format for reading or receiving the news.
iv.     With assistive technology becoming more beneficial to mainstream technology users, one can envision a commuter using an electronic book based on DAISY technology to listen to audio files while driving, or read text while relaxing at home.

2007 Microsoft Office system
a.      Improved support for Assistive Technology Vendors: MSAA support is greatly improved for a variety of technologies such as screen readers, Braille keyboards, magnifiers, and speech recognition applications.
b.      A More Accessible User Interface:  The 2007 Microsoft Office system UI communicates more information that accessible technology can use (screen readers, learning aids, magnifiers, enlargers) than ever before.
i.      Screen Tips information is exposed to assistive technology, providing a great deal of information about controls without the need to access help.
ii.     UI context is conveyed for all ribbon controls.  For example, a screen reader can tell you the bold button is in the font group on the Home tab.  In this way, blind users can create a much better “mental map” of the UI by knowing control context.
iii.    Quick access toolbar provides a way for users to place the features they need frequently in the same place so that navigation is easier and finding tools is always the same or something like that.
iv.     Painless editing experience: Live Preview is particularly helpful to mobility impaired users, for example someone who is only able to execute 2 or 3 keystrokes per minute.  Keystrokes saved by Live Preview in an operation such as choosing a font, for example, are considerable and very valuable to such a user.
v.      Improved high contrast/large font support
vi.     SmartArt(tm) Graphics:  This is a new tool for creating great looking graphics, diagrams and flow charts within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by using text entry only.  This empowers disabled users to create powerful and compelling content easily.
vii.    Keyboard Features: There are more accelerator keys and full legacy key support to make transition to the new Office System as easy as possible.
*       The 2007 Microsoft Office system includes improved support for screen readers, magnifiers, speech recognition, alternative displays and other assistive technologies. More than 10 million compatibility packs that allow users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office to work with Open XML have been downloaded around the world. Open XML  Community: Global Momentum
*       Open XML documents will be made available to the 180 million people worldwide who are blind or visually impaired through the creation of a downloadable plug-in that translates Open XML into DAISY XML, the globally accepted standard for talking books.
*       Technical guidelines for Open XML accessibility implementation are available on http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2007/07/02/Accessibility_of_Open_XML.aspx

About the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA) AIA - Accessibility Interoperability Alliance
*       A coalition of leading information and assistive technology companies, including Microsoft, have formed  the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), an engineering working group dedicated to enabling developers to more easily create accessible software, hardware and Web products.
*       Microsoft’s partnership with AIA will bring unified industry action to create greater interoperability will stimulate the development of increased innovation around accessibility.
*       AIA brings together accessible technology leaders from IT, AT, Web, test, and tool companies to address the complexity of developing accessible products and improving interoperability to provide more choices
*       AIA’s collective experience and expertise will result in a broader array of market-driven accessible technology solutions that are interoperable, innovative and flexible.

Cheers,
Tanakom.

January 21, 2009

International Seminar on Textbooks in DAISY format - “Future of the Textbooks for All” will be held at Kyoto International Community House on February 5th, 2009. Hosts: Japanese Society for Rehabilitation of Persons with Disabilities (JSRPD) and Assistive Technology Development Organization (ATDO).

Details are available below…

International Seminar On Textbooks in DAISY format
-Future of the textbooks for all

Objective:
School Textbooks in DAISY format are widely used in the USA and European Countries as “alternative textbooks” for children and students with reading problems. However such textbooks are not yet popular in Japan due to the lack of social recognition on developmental disorders as well as technical difficulties in converting textbooks in Japanese into DAISY format.

Learning from experiences and projects in Europe and the USA concerning the provision of alternative textbooks in DAISY format, we will discuss the future of textbooks for all to promote DAISY together with the participants as well as lecturers.

Organizers:　Japanese Society for Rehabilitation of persons with Disabilities
1.              Assistive Technology Development Organization
2.              DAISY Consortium

Date and Time: 13:00 – 17:00 Thursday, February 5 2009�
Venue: Event Hall. Kyoto International Community House
Lecturers:
3. Edmar Schut - Dedicon, Netherlands
4. George Kerscher - Secretary General, DAISY Consortium
5. Richard Orme– Head of Accessibility, RNIB UK
6. Kjell  Hanson –TPB Sweden
7. Hiroshi Kawamura – President, DAISY Consortium

 Program
　　
13:00 Opening Remarks
 Shuzo Kataishi, Executive Director of JSRPD

13:05-13:20 Keynote Speech
 Hiroshi Kawamura, President of DAISY Consortium
13:20-15:00　　　　Session 1: Present Situation of Provision of DAISY Textbooks
 George Kerscher - Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium　
 Kjell Hanson – TPB Sweden
8. Richard Orme– Head of Accessibility, RNIB
9. Edmar Schut – Dedicon. the Netherlands
15:00-15:20　　　　Break
15:20-16:55　　　　Session 2: Panel Discussion
    Theme: Future of Textbooks in DAISY format

　　　　　　　　 　 Coordinator: Hiroshi Kawamura
               　  Panelists:      Edmar Schut - Dedicon, the Netherlands
                                            George Kerscher - Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium　
                                             Kjell Hanson – TPB Sweden
10. Richard Orme– Head of Accessibility, RNIB UK

16:55-17:00　　  Closing Remarks

Milestone 312 represents a new generation of aids for visually impaired and blind people. But also people with sight have a growing interest in the device. Milestone 312 includes an enormous functionality in the popular small Milestone casing, in credit card size.

What is Milestone 312 able to do?

Voice records in high quality can be done with Milestone 312 and played over its powerful speaker or headphones. The integrated music player plays all popular formats. Time-consuming conversions are a thing of the past. With the built-in text to speech software Milestone 312 can also convert and read text files, as for example word files.

Of course Milestone 312 plays DAISY books. Furthermore other formats as for example from Audible.com can be used. No matter what you are playing, Milestone 312 can increase and decrease playback or reading speed via several levels to conform to your tempo.

Further applications are, an integrated clock an alarm an much more functions. To avoid an impairment of the simple handling caused by the variety of new functions Milestone 312 enables a strong configurability to the user’s needs.

Software Extras

The possibilities mentioned above belong all to the basic version of Milestone 312. Further Software Extras are acquirable at anytime with your dealer. Already available and ready for activation are an integrated radio and the tag reader “Speakout”. The range of Software Extras is growing steadily and customers wishes are fulfilled continuously. More details you can find under the link „ Software Extras for M312“.

Add-Ons

Add-Ons follow the same purpose as Software Extras. Those hardware extras for Milestone 312 are plugged on the main device and a new dimension of applications is available. A color reader and a stereo microphone are launching the Add-On product line. More details you can find under the link „Add-Ons for M312“.

Hardware

Milestone 312 contains a powerful hardware with lots of room for new developments. On the hardware components no compromises were accepted. Therefore Milestone 312 integrates the newest USB 2.0 High Speed connection and guarantees a rapid access to the computer. The internal memory space has been increased up to 1GB and in turn again is expandable by a multiple via insertable SD memory card (currently up to 32 GB).

By Scott M. Fulton, III

December 16, 2008, 3:03 PM

In a move designed to intentionally eliminate all surprises, Microsoft posted a detailed guide to its planned implementation of OpenDocument Format in the next edition of Office, to an interoperability Web site it launched last March.

By designating point-by-point how it intends to implement elements of the ODF 1.1 standard in Word, Excel, and other future editions of the suite still, for now, named “Office 14,” Microsoft may quite literally be seizing the initiative. Specifically, by pre-empting its own effort in documenting how it will implement Open XML — the internationally standardized derivative of the XML-based format Office 2007 already put in motion — the company appears to be taking public steps to document what could easily become the most deployed ODF-supporting application come next year.

In so doing, it could end up setting the standard, if you will, for following the standard, playing its opponents game to its own advantage.

For example, what does it mean for an inline element to be “anchored to” a paragraph? In Microsoft Word with the old OOXML format, an anchor to paragraphs often appears in the upper left corner of that paragraph, but it can also be anchored to the “text” someplace in the middle.

This morning’s detailed implementation document sets forth the rule that the company plans to follow: “Within text documents, images, embedded objects and other drawing objects may be anchored to a paragraph, to a character, or as a character,” states Rule 5.8, under the heading “Inline Graphics and Text Boxes.” “If they are anchored to a paragraph, they appear within a paragraph at an arbitrary position. If they are anchored to or as a character, they appear within a paragraph at exactly the character position they are anchored to or as.”

Here’s another quandary: How do you represent tracked changes to a document? In a Word file, with “Track Changes” turned on, you can effectively delete any length of text from one point to the next; the word processor will display the text that’s deleted from the final printout, but usually in a different color (often red) with underscoring. But let’s say the deleted passage starts in a table, and proceeds outside the table to encompass a span of ordinary paragraphs, in the middle of which is a bulleted list. That’s three or perhaps four elements that are being deleted, not just one, depending on how you structure the deletion in XML.

Rule 4.3 demonstrates how Microsoft intends to handle this dilemma with ODF: It will create an independent XML element structure that details the audit information about the changes being made — for instance, who’s doing the changes and when. That’s a self-contained element, and all it has are the properties for the responsible party, and an ID tag for the change itself. Next, Office 14 will embed an XML tag inline in the text where the change (such as a deletion) begins, and another tag at the point in which it ends, with both tags containing the ID that links them to the properties block.

There are all types of implementation issues that have to be addressed by this document, especially in light of the fact that ODF — despite its status as a “standard” — chose to implement certain elements in arbitrary, not previously standardized, ways. In a blog post last August, Microsoft senior product manager Doug Mahugh demonstrated a few instances where ODF’s arbitrary choices and Microsoft’s equally arbitrary choices for OOXML resulted in situations where one implementation could not map to the other equivalently.

“In simple cases, it isn’t a problem for Word to preserve document structure and semantics when saving an ODF file,” Mahugh wrote. “For example, a document heading can be saved with a heading style that has an associated outline level.

“In more complex cases we preferred a neutral approach when saving to ODF rather than implying semantics that the user did not intend,” he continued. “For example, in Word one can color code the bullets in a bulleted list by applying a color attribute to the paragraph character for the list item. Word can persist that attribute when saving to OOXML, but ODF does not have the concept of paragraph characters with attributes. If we were to apply the color attribute to the paragraph style that would cause the entire list item to take on the color, and this might imply more than the user meant. So we choose to drop the bullet color, rather than color the whole list item.”

In other words, Microsoft chose not to change the color of the text when translating a bullet list item whose text is one color but whose bullet is another, into a format which perceives both the bullet and the text as bound by the same characteristics.

This morning’s product of the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) is not intended to explain how Microsoft plans to translate ODF, however. Rather, as Mahugh first revealed to us last May, the company intends to support ODF as one of the user’s choice of default formats in the new Office 14, so this set of guidelines will detail how Microsoft chooses to implement ODF 1.1. When a similar set of guidelines is published for Open XML — in the coming weeks, a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews this afternoon — individuals may be able to compare implementations to gauge the road ahead for those who will be taking on the task of translation between formats.

“Microsoft is taking a comprehensive approach toward interoperability and believes that for true interoperability all vendors must be good stewards by participating in the maintenance of standards, must be transparent in their implementation of standards, and must collaborate with others across the industry,” reads the spokesperson’s statement to BetaNews this afternoon. “This is important to help customers achieve the interoperability they need to be successful.”

UPDATE The first official implementation of ODF in an Office app in advance of Office 14 will actually be in Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews this afternoon is slated for no later than April.