11/20/2007
First group of proposed dispositions shared with the National Standards Bodies and DAISY...
The Technical Committee at ECMA has done some hard work, and the representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Gnome Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress have delivered 662 proposed dispositions to the comments.
ECMA has chosen to keep the National Standards Bodies informed of the progress they are making regarding the disposition of the comments. This means that the people directly involved in the DIS29500 process have an early insight in how ECMA proposed to address the submitted comments on the Ecma Office Open XML standard.
During the Ballot Resolution Meeting (25-29 February) the international representatives can discuss and vote on the proposed dispositions.
The public statement by Ecma TC45's Tom Ngo (NextPage) is here: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/First%20group%20of%20662%20proposed%20dispositions%20of%20comments%20posted.htm
Earlier there was the message that Open XML will add more accessibility support than already was the case in the specification itself: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/nov07/11-13daisy.mspx
Efforts to level the playing field for print-disabled readers received a major boost this week with news that Microsoft is developing a tool for Microsoft Word, to be released as a downloadable plug-in at no charge early next year, that will enable the translation of millions of Open XML documents into DAISY XML, the lingua franca of the globally accepted Digital Access Information SYstem, or DAISY, standard for digital talking books.
The DAISY Consortium, a coalition of talking-book libraries and nonprofit organizations, was formed in 1996 to harness the rich capabilities opened up by the transition from analog to digital technology to ensure that all published information is available to people with print disabilities at the same time and at no greater cost in accessible, feature-rich, navigable format.
Also in The Netherlands, DAISY is in use:
The announcement was given some press coverage, and Wilberd Gijzel made his own interpretation of it here: http://automatiseringgids.sdu.nl/ag/nieuws/nieuws/toon_nieuwsbericht.jsp?di=369605
Microsoft is al een tijd bezig zijn Open XML documenten tot internationale standaard uit te laten roepen om zo een groter publiek te trekken. Tot nu toe is dat mislukt omdat volgens de International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) Open XML niet volledig 'open' is, maar gebruikers nog steeds afhankelijk maakt van Microsoft producten.
(personal translation) Microsoft has been busy for a while to make its Open XML documents into an international standard, to draw a larger audience. So far this has failed because according to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) Open XML is not fully 'open', but keeps users dependent on Microsoft's products.
It seems Wilberd has not really been paying attention to for example this site: http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/
Where it is is clear that there is a broad industry support for the format, including from competitors and on multiple platforms (including Linux, Palm OS, Apple Mac OSX, Apple iPhone and Windows).
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