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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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