Building on many existing
technologies and standards, it is envisioned that a set of technologies
can be created which contribute someway in creating open accessible
information processing for the visually impaired and related
accessibility communities. This project intends to provide several
components, which contribute to the multi modal transformation from
input formats into accessible output formats.
The limit of the scope of this project is not set, but it is intended
that as primary goals, code already created by the administrators of
the project will be extended to at least encompass the opendocument
format (
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office)
as input, and convert this to the DAISY dtbook format(
http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/Z39-86-2002.html),
Braille Formats and Accessible PDF formats. This code can then be
integrated into Openoffice.org.
How much further the project goes in term of integration of formats
depends very much on the Openoffice.org community and the open source
community as a whole, but it is envisioned that extension of the code
and scope can take place to include Talking Book generation on the
fly(Possibly Based on MPEG 4 –SA), Large Print text
formats(Possibly based on SVG),
For input, it would be advantageous to extend to some of the
other formats used by industry including Quark, Adobe, MS Word(Possibly
through the use of Macros), Wordperfect and generic XML input.
The work is carried out by members of the European Commission
eInclusion funded EUAIN consortium(www.euain.org), and will be
used as a showcase of existing technologies for publishers, but in
order to ensure that the code has a life beyond the length of the
project the development will take place through sf.net from the onset.
