[documentliberation-discuss] introduction

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odt2daisy addon for libreoffice which could do this but it is no longer maintained and I do not 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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