Reading Systems Minutes March 14 at 16 UTC

Reading Systems Minutes March 14 at 16 UTC

·  Day: Tuesday, March 14, 2017

·  Time: 16 UTC 9:00 a.m. Pacific, 12:00 p.m. Eastern, 17:00 Stockholm

·  DAISY Conference call line: +1 712/432-7300

·  Pin: 25693#

·  Backup number for any problems: +1 832/999-6040 Use the same pin.

Participants: Steve, George, Prashant, Marisa, Ginny, Amy, Charles, Lloyd, Wayne,

Agenda

W3C Publishing Business Group meeting brief update

George: Yesterday from 3am to 9am Pacific Time, the Digital publishing working group has their first kick off meeting. This is with the people from IDPF. It was primarily organizational but we did talk about some things that relate to us. It doesn’t look like the working group will meet June 5th and 6th. They will be schedule it later in June because the charter has to be out two months before there is a meeting. So they’re still trying to figure it out. So I’d bet around June 22nd and 23rd.

The other interesting item is that W3C now is the other partner in EPUBtest.org so it’s w3c, BSIG and Daisy working on it. There’s discussions about how it might change and proposals to do something more like a test harness that w3c users for testing things. There’s nothing decided yet, but they’re looking at that. The accessibility group is being praised for keeping up with the testing we’re doing, so that’s great. Marisa I know you can’t be asked to do oodles of work if the site would change, so that’s one of the considerations.

Marisa: I’m not sure how they will do it with the test harness, but I guess we’ll find out.

George: I think a lot of those CSS tests are automated

Marisa: We’ll wait and see I guess

George: We’re in good shape with what we’re doing

London Book Fair running this week

George: Brad and Robin are there from Benetech, Richard and Avneesh are there from Daisy. There will be some accessibility meetings there. Bill McCoy is presenting there. Accessibility continues to be a high value item in publishing at the London Bookfare so we’re doing well there.

Lloyd: Neil Bernstein and I will be at the NFB meeting next Thursday. We’re not on the agenda, but we will be there.

CSUN recap

George: Richard, Amaya and I did our presentation Friday afternoon. We had about 25 people in the room and I think that went well. We go some questions from one young lady who didn’t understand the concept of a reading system which I think speaks volumes. People understand what a browser is, but don’t understand these applications, so I don’t know if the NLS player that gets distributed freely is ever referred to as a Reading System. Any other comments from that session? Anything else people want to say about CSUN as it related to the work of this working group?

Amy: I just wanted to say that I thought you did a great job in your presentation Friday morning giving a view of the landscape.

Charles: One thing that was interesting was during our code sprint we found that Firefox has a plug in called Lucifox reader which can read MathML which was fairly impressive.

George: Rachel Comerford who was with us in the conformance and certification presaentation and she was in the Friday morning state of the industry report has signed up to be the co-chair of the community group for EPUB3 maintenance. So that is great news, so we have two co-chairs and the editor and 87 people signed up for that group so far.

Amy: I will be signing up for that George once I’m back to my office.

George: I think that work we’ll get kicked off and looking at the accessibility spec 1.1 to see what kind of changes we need to make to it. I really enjoyed the Friday morning presentation. I think I’ve decided to ditch slides completely. I think what I will be doing is putting together a resource sheet and then just speak from resources.

Amy: I don’t know, Charles, if you were able to attend the Vitalsource interactivity. The code that was presented is available, so if you need access to it I will send you a link to the Epub3. It was done in EPUB3, the presentation, and I can send it to you, and it has code samples that I could sent you for the interactivity.

Charles: that would be awesome, thank you. I’m in the process of the certification.

George: doing a presentation in EPUB 3, that’s an idea!

Amy: A lot of it is feedback, dealing with responses for screen reader users, but doesn’t interfere with the visual look, so I’ll send it to the list with a little on what it is.

George: I’m seeing a lot of people working on things and if they see this they will have more of a tendency to collaborate than to develop it themselves.

Amy: we also have the code for the emodles and what we have to do to make them work in browsers as well as across platforms.

Math Update

George: We have a call this coming Thursday. We will be looking at three or four of the options for including math that includes and SVG image of the math and then the MathML expression that is associated with that SVG and hiding the MathML but exposing it to AT. The other new edition is the possibility of adding a Java script item in the file that has MathML that would, if allowed to run, if AT is present it would, Charles will it remove the SVG?

Charles: It will keep the SVG image so you can zoom in and out, but it might remove the alt text from it so it doesn’t speak. During our testing, if we find a reading system that the MathML speaks horribly we might remove or comment out the MathML so we will discuss all of this during our MathML call on Thursday. Whether we will make the MathML the main and the image and the Alt text the fall back or vice versa depending on the reading system.

Amy: Charles do you want to the vitalsource samples before that call?

Charles: That would be great.

George: If you want anyone on the call, let us know and we will give you that dial in information. We want to get this nailed down in the next quarter and have a recommendation to publishers.

Dyslexia recommendations document update

George: Richard has circulated his document on dyslexia recommendations to a number of dyslexia professionals and is gathering feedback and he should be with us for our next call and be able to present that information, so next call will be a dyslexic focused call.

Low Vision Requirements

George: I’d like to make sure what I have is right so we can improve the bullets. Maybe we could comment on them and try to figure out if it is a fundamental or advanced feature. Marisa, we know that we have two existing tests in our test grid that are probably not worded the best. Remind us what we can change in the fundamental book without messing up the other tests?

Marisa: Not a whole lot. It won’t screw up anything else, but it will flag it as needing to be retested.

George: if we improve the language on the visual tests?

Marisa: yes because if someone interpreted it differently, the wording change might cause them to give a different responses.

George: If we added things that would do the same?

Marisa: Yes, any change. But it just triggers flagging for those tests, not all of them.

George: So that one portion we might ask people to do

Amy: Is there any way to be notified when tests are out of date or need updating?

Marisa: No, there is no notification system set up right now. Depending on the future of the site we could look into it. Typically in the past when there are updates the list gets an email about it.

George: So notifications, when you come out with a new version of a reading system Amy, doesn’t that automatically trigger going back to check?

Amy: It does, but if a test changes, like the ones you are talking about for low vision, I wouldn’t know unless I was going in to update for a new version.

George: I see, when we change the fundamental test book we will send that notification out.

Amy: Could you change my email address? I’ll send it to you.

Lloyd: I looked at some of the math samples and I don’t have a good epub reader that I can say, yeah I should do some testing with this, and I don’t know what to try to use under windows using a screen readers, I can run jaws, window eyes or NVDA, right now the system is on windows 7, but I’m not sure I should be trying to use as an EPUB reader. I feel like if we’re telling people we’re ready to start certifying stuff, and a big push is the math, are the systems even ready for college ready math? Seems to me there’s a disconnect between what is available and what is being touted as such.

George: My personal recommendation is Vitalsource for Windows. It’s an application you can associate that with your Epubs in your system. You can copy an epub, put it somewhere on your system and leave it there and copy it to the name of the folder in Vitalsource, just paste it into the name of the folder.

Amy: I can send you the stuff I have on that. I can send you a link to the download page. Once you have a vital source account created if you need anything so you don’t have to side load it, if it’s something I can help put into your account I will, but if it’s not available, like the samples Charles is working with, then I’ll send you the instructions I have to side load.

Lloyd: Okay, we can do that, but I think we should be looking at what else is out there that comes even close. If we can get an EPUB reader to work with speech and or braille but the large print is terrible, we ought to be able to tell them what those systems are.

George: I totally agree with you, and with you being such a high level mathematician and engineer, your comments here will be invaluable

Lloyd: I’m not that big in to Math any more, but it’s of a lot of interest to me

George: and I think it’s a lot of interest to anyone concerned about students using that and being able to use that

Amy: We have a little bug right now with Jaws and refreshable braille, but one of the developers is helping me fix it.

George: we should get the list of those devices up there.

Amy: I think it is, but if not we will have it added.

George: I think we just have one

Amy: Okay, I’ll have Ricky update them. The apps are free to download and once you sent up your account email me from the email you used to create the account I’ll get the books ingested for you.

With an ingested book you can search the book and do a little more, with a side load there are some limitations.

Charles: When you send the information to the list on the samples, can you also provide the information you will provide Lloyd on how to side load if needed

Amy: I’ll send the link to the app and the instructions

George: Did you finish the user manual for using vitalsource

Amy: No, we’re still working on it. It got shelved last year, but I’m trying to reinvigorate. I’ll send a link to the accessibility support hub. We have quite a few articles within that hub.

George: So maybe a list of links that would help us, that would be great.

Requirements for Low vision:

George: so what do we think of “OS system colors preserved in application”
Amy: maybe we should say applying user design colors in the application

George: if a person changes their system colors that’s fine. Then they go into the application and here they may need to change their system colors, their colors for the application, if those colors were not moved forward from the operating system

Amy: yes, I’m saying they should. If they are creating it and not blocking that functionality, the system should apply the user selected color preferences

George: That would make this one item instead of two. So we don’t need the operating system colors, we need to be able to have color control on foreground and background colors. Is that right?

Amy: I don’t know if you need to get that specific. If you’re looking at bookshelf windows for example, it’s a windows based program so it will apply the color settings the user picks. The book reader is an internet explorer rendering engine so if they created it to display the user selected color settings it will, but some people lock that ability out.

Wayne: there is the problem that Windows has been limiting the number of colors you can choose. I have no idea what the next release will allow, but you have very limited color choices these days

George: Was that Wayne?

Wayne: I used to love Windows, but now you have just 60 colors to choose from. I found one that doesn’t hurt much, but I sure wouldn’t want to read a book with it.

George: For our tests, Amy, you had nice language, could you say that again?

Amy: Does the reading system apply user defined operating system color preferences

George: I think we’re saying this is a fundamental test

Prashant: In that case, do we remove the high contrast test?

Amy: I would say yes, because one of the preferences could be high contrast

Prashant: the mobile operating system even

Amy: Mobile should too, there is no reason they shouldn’t be applied unless the developer is blocking them

Marisa: Maybe someone likes to use contrast while they are reading, but wouldn’t use it in the same way in general so I think they should be separate

Charles: I think if we limit it to the test displays in the EPUB that can be changed, but if someone sets a different, or if they’re in mobile and I’m not aware of a high contrast mode, but that gets applied to the operating system itself. I think the application should be able to define the content that you’re trying to consume or display, versus the application chrome will be tied to what the operating system can or cannot support, but if you fail a reading system because of the operating system that is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater