hi all My name is Kendell clark. I'm an active open source contributor and active on http://www.linux-a11y.org. In short, our mission is to make linux accessibility easy, both for users and for developers. We have a long way to go, but that's not why I subscribed to this mailing list. I'm al for liberating documents out of proprietary file formats and my case is a good example of proprietary formats. I'm writing to see if anyone is interested in helping to create a library for working with the "daisy" digital accessible information system, format. It's not exactly proprietary, since it is documented, and has specs, available at http://www.daisy.org/specifications, but it is not much used, and when it is used, it is used almost exclusively by proprietary addaptive applications for reading the daisy format, such as fs reader, which is part of the "job access with speech", hor jaws, screen reader for microsoft windows. There are two different versions of the standard, both completely different from one another. Daisy 2.02, which is the oldest, and daisy 3.0, which is the newest. Now daisy has largely been succeeded by the open epub standard, but popular book sites for the visually impaired still use the legacy format, although they do offer epub formats. I would like to work on a libarary, maybe called libdaisy, to convert daisy files into open formats. There was at one point, an odt2daisy addon for libreoffice which could do this but it is no longer maintained and I do not believe was open source, although I could be wrong about that. There is one caveat to daisy and that is that there is optional drm, digital rights management, built inot the spec. The definition of this support is so vague as to provide a skeleton framework for the drm without defining any specific methods for drm, probably so companies can each develop their own, completely incompatible, drm frameworks. The one saving grace is that the daisy 3 spec shares a lot of code with the epub spec. They even use some of the same xml tags, so adding daisy 3 support shouldn't be too hard. Daisy 2 is a completely different animal and uses html, along with smil, simple multimedia integration language I believe it stands for. Now I am completely new to contributing to you guys, so I am not at all familiar with the tools you guys use, or even whether they are accessible. I cannot directly write computer code, but I can provide specifications, sample documents, and information about the formats I'm interested in if that would be helpful. There is a desperate need for daisy support in open source software because linux currently has a handful of daisy readers, most of which are abandoned long ago. There is one active daisy reader, but it is command line only and only plays the older daisy 2 format, and then only from cd. I also forgot to mention that the daisy 2 and daisy 3 file spec also has support for audio files, wav or mp3 file formats only. Is anyone interested? Thanks Kendell Clark -- Open source is much more than just a license. It is a community. It is freedom personified. It is a community of people exercising their god given rights to use, study, modify, and share software and ideas. And break drom just for the hell of it.
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