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Subject: Sec. 5 Revised
Herewith the text of my revision. Sorry for all the delay. I've also sent a .odt to Peter, but I couldn't figure out how to do a cross reference to Sec. 4.2.6 -- Janina Sajka Phone: +1.202.595.7777 Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC http://CapitalAccessibility.Com Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada--Go to http://ScreenlessPhone.Com to learn more. Chair, Accessibility Workgroup Free Standards Group (FSG) janina@freestandards.org http://a11y.org
5.1 Where and How Audio is Used for Accessibility Audio renditions of textual content were commonly used to provide alternative access for print disabled individuals long before "audiobooks" became commercially available. When large print versions cannot serve, when braille is not an option (for whatever reason), audio has historically filled the gap. Audio renditions have become so common and powerful that development on more effective use of audio has continued. In recent years best practice in audio rendition has been codified in an ANSI/NISO standard, Z39.86. This same specification has been adopted internationally by a consortium of libraries for the blind and print handicapped called the DAISY Consortium. In turn, this ANSI specification also serves as the basis for the U.S. legal mandate to provide accessible text books and curricular material in U.S. Schools, known as NIMAS. Materials produced in audio include everything from novels for leisure reading, to newspapers, magazines, and technical reference material (in addition to curricular material). There are also national programs for creating and distributing such content across Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as well as many other countries. 5.2 How ODF Fits In ?? ODF authoring applications are relevant to alternative media production, because alternative media production, including audio, almost always begin as does any document, authored, spell-checked, proofread, and prepared for printing to paper. Because the ANSI/NISO and the NIMAS standards are XML specifications, there exists the opportunity to directly transform a properly prepared ODF document. Thus, ODF can readily serve as an authoring environment not only for print and e-documents, but for braille, large-print, and audio alternative renditions. ODF is, in fact, well suited to support commonly available authoring tools in the production of legally mandated alternative media. 5.2.1 Soft Page Breaks and Hard Page Numbering [Ref to spec revision][Ref to spec revision] at Sec. 4.2.6 Even the simplest content cannot be discussed in a group environment if there is no simple mechanism to point the group members to a particular location in the document. Pagination is the most common resolution to this problem, e.g. people will say something like: "please look at page 3 beginning at paragraph 2." Hhowever pagination needs specific coding in order to support alternative media where actual page numbers will be very different, e.g. print page 7 may be braille page 48. Alternative media such as audio large print and braille require a mechanism that allows users to know, which page number is being referred to in the source document. 5.2.2 Structural Markup Effective use of audio renditions requires that users have the ability to move quickly back and forth through the audio rendition based on the structure of the document. Traditional audio playback equipment provided fast forward and rewind mechanisms, but these are highly inefficient because time offsets are actually irrelevant to content. Effective support of alternative rendering, and especially audio rendering, requires that the source document should be correctly tagged with structural markup. Both the ANSI and NIMAS specifications rely on XML markup to allow rendering agents to support quick movement forward and backward through content based on chapters, subsections, footnotes, paragraphs, and other structural elements. The most effective devices allow users to adjust "levels" of navigation granularity, so that hierarchical structures such as X.Y.Z might be navigated at the X level, the Y level, or the Z level, at the user's option. This provides further emphasis on the importance of document structure when an ODF document is exported.
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