[nfb-talk] Article Missrepresents Curtis Chong:

[Kenneth Chrane]

    Microsoft grows DAISY for blind computer users while Adobe wilts

Eric Lai

  May 09, 2008 (Computerworld) The release of an esoteric plug-in for a 
20-year-old piece of software normally doesn't merit much attention - except 
when the software is the ubiquitous Microsoft Word and the add-on could have 
a major positive effect on the 1.5 million blind or visually impaired 
Americans who use computers, the millions more like them around the globe, 
and, potentially, tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide with 
developmental disabilities or reading problems.



Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the availability of a plug-in 
(downloadable from openxmlcommunity.org) that lets users of Word 2007, 2003 
and XP easily save documents in the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information 
SYstem) XML format.



DAISY XML is the latest iteration of a decade-old standard developed by the 
DAISY Consortium, a leading nonprofit group serving the vision-impaired, to 
be the most accessible format for blind computer users.



Hidden structures

Why DAISY, when screen readers and text-to-speech tools already let blind 
computer users hear HTML Web pages and Word or PDF documents recited aloud?



For one, the experience, as illustrated in an April Computerworld feature on 
computing for the blind, remains intensely frustrating. Narrator, the screen 
reader built into Windows XP and Vista, is so crude that even Microsoft 
admits that it is not suitable for daily use.



Meanwhile, popular third-party readers, such as JAWS, are expensive. The 
standard version of JAWS, for instance, costs $895; another package, 
EasyConverter from Dolphin Computer Access Ltd., weighs in at $5,200. And 
the experience with JAWS and others remains uneven or poor, according to 
Curtis Chong, president of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer 
Science. "If something is coded up wrong, your screen reader sees nothing," 
Chong said.



Why so bad? The problem is that for the blind, the most important parts of a 
page are the parts even the sighted can't perceive -- invisible metadata 
embedded in the document. What's missed isn't the stylistic metadata that 
sighted users usually think about, such as font, size or color, but 
attributes such as paragraph marks, table structures and headings, which 
determine a document's actual structure.



Good structural metadata lets a blind user nimbly navigate, browse and 
search a document. Word and PDF weren't built from the ground up to support 
that. DAISY was.



"DAISY is a fantastic format due to its flexibility," said Sam Ogami, an 
assistive-technology expert for the California State University system's 
chancellor's office. "From DAISY, you can easily move to other accessible 
formats, such as Braille or large print, in addition to audio, with little 
to no extra work."



Letting users of Microsoft Word -- the most popular text-authoring tool on 
the planet -- save documents in DAISY format with one click is a "great step 
in the right direction of creating accessible content," said Ogami, who has 
tested the plug-in.



George Kerscher, secretary general of the DAISY Consortium, was even more 
effusive.



"We would like all publishers to make their content painlessly accessible," 
he said in an interview earlier this spring. "Microsoft is the first one to 
step forward to do this."



Growing a DAISY plug-in

The plug-in was developed by Microsoft, the DAISY Consortium and an Indian 
software vendor called Sonata Software Ltd. It is also being hosted on 
SourceForge as an open-source project.



Andrew Savikas, a publishing software guru at O'Reilly Media Inc. and head 
of its annual Tools of Change for Publishing conference, said the Word 
plug-in was "long overdue."



When Microsoft started switching from binary to XML document formats in Word 
2003, "this kind of conversion/transformation became much more transparent 
to implement," he said. He conceded, though, that "you could argue that a 
plug-in like this should have come from a third party, rather than from 
Microsoft, who I'd assume aren't interested in developing and supporting a 
bunch of plug-ins for formats they don't control."



Chong called the plug-in "wonderful," but cautioned that there remains a gap 
between theory and practice.



"If the initial Word document wasn't marked up properly by the author [with 
metadata] in the first place, then it's as bad as not having the document at 
all," he said.



Jutta Treviranus, a professor at the Adaptive Technology Resource Center at 
the University of Toronto, argues that this dearth of "consistent 
guidelines" for authors interested in creating potentially accessible 
documents in Word is only one of several problems.



In a paper she co-published earlier this year, Treviranus argued that Word 
2007's native document format, Office Open XML (OOXML), violated other 
fundamental tenets such as not conflating stylistic metadata with structural 
metadata.



"I have grave concerns with the DAISY XML that will be produced" from a Word 
2007 document, Treviranus said.



Meanwhile, Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance, argues 
that Microsoft's format remains inferior to the OpenDocument Format he 
champions.



"The accessibility of ODF was reviewed and subsequent changes were 
incorporated in ODF v1.1, establishing ODF as the benchmark, exceeding the 
accessibility features of any other document format," he said.



Reed Shaffner, a product manager for Microsoft Office, acknowledges that the 
Save-as-DAISY translator is far from perfect today. Highly structured 
documents -- an IRS 1040 tax form, for instance, with its multiple fill-in 
boxes -- still pose difficulties for the plug-in.



Shaffner is quicker to defend the OOXML format's accessibility features.



"It's already pretty strong. We're making animated graphics accessible, for 
instance," he said. Some improvements were made during OOXML's ISO 
ratification process two months ago, and more are coming.



Treviranus, he argues, "may be confusing [a document author's] bad behavior 
with document standard behavior. The information is there in the standard."



As for criticism from the ODF camp, Shaffner said that ODF may support 
accessibility "in theory, but we've put out a translator."



What about Adobe?

Microsoft's proactive embrace of DAISY begs the question: What is Adobe 
Systems Inc., the other leading document creation software vendor, doing to 
support DAISY?



Nothing directly for now, admits Andrew Kirkpatrick, senior manager for 
accessibility at Adobe, though he claims "it is under serious consideration. 
DAISY may be a useful format to export to, particularly in the case of 
longer documents, such as those created by FrameMaker."



We've heard that before, said Kerscher, who added that he has repeatedly 
asked Adobe for a commitment to support DAISY and has failed each time.



Chong said, "Adobe has done a lot of work to make reading a document 
accessible, but it has done far less work on the composition side."



What Adobe has done, instead, is enable the latest version of its page 
layout program, Creative Suite 3 InDesign, to export into the ePub format. 
ePub supports the NIMAS standard, which Kirkpatrick characterized as a 
"subset of DAISY."



O'Reilly Media's Savikas thinks Adobe has made a smart choice by backing the 
ePub format, which he said is fast becoming the "MP3 of eBooks." But he said 
his initial experiments with Adobe's ePub feature left him "disappointed."



"We ran tests on a few of our 'Head First' books, and the resulting output 
was essentially useless," he said. After some "back-and-forth with Adobe," 
it became clear that the books had to be redesigned with extra formatting 
metadata for ePub, said Savikas. "Most people who hear that InDesign can 
export to ePub assume it's as easy as "Save as..." and it's not."



Besides creating a formal program to help third-party screen-reader vendors 
make their software work better with Adobe software, Adobe is trying to 
improve the accessibility of its own formats, such as PDF, SWF (Flash) and 
others, said Kirkpatrick.



"DAISY is popular and may well be a valued format for blind users, but Adobe 
is not prepared to determine what is the format of choice for blind users," 
Kirkpatrick said.



Chong agreed, saying that most blind computer users could care less about 
the war of words over DAISY versus ePub.



"It's not the format that is of concern to the blind. We just want to make 
sure there are programs that we can use," he said.



Let a thousand flowers bloom

In that vein, a plug-in to convert PowerPoint slides into DAISY XML is in 
the works, Shaffner said, with the DAISY Consortium just finishing gathering 
requirements for such a tool.



An Excel plug-in is unlikely, he said, due to technical difficulty and lack 
of user interest.



Meanwhile, the existing Word plug-in is built in such a way that it could 
someday be ported to versions of OpenOffice.org that support OOXML, such as 
Novell Inc.'s version, Shaffner said.



Besides accelerating the conversion of electronic documents and books into 
DAISY for visually impaired computer users, the plug-in(s) could aid in the 
DAISY Consortium's new goal of helping to make documents and books 
accessible to the illiterate, dyslexic or developmentally disabled.



For instance, the DAISY Consortium is helping to convert HIV and AIDS 
prevention manuals into the DAISY format so that poor, illiterate South 
Africans can access them. DAISY might also be used to "help synchronize text 
and audio and help kids who are learning to read," Shaffner said.