Meeting minutes
<tzviya> date: 2023-02-10
EPUB 3.3 PR and associated issues
dauhwe: Our PR was rejected because it had been too long since we did a CR snapshot
… despite the fact that our changes were extremely minor
… We had a call the other day and are in better shape than we thought.
… We need emails from APA and the TAG saying we're oka
… and then restart the PR process and submit the CR request again.
… Messy, but we can probably be to PR by May.
wendyreid: We're okay on APA; we need PING and TAG.
tzviya: We should actually be okayy on both of those, we have good contacts.
dauwhe: We're already doing most of the things they're asking us to do.
tzviya: we should still be on our way to PR soon. Thanks to everybody for the good work.
What’s next for the Publishing Activity?
tzviya: We keep having this discussion. What are the issues that keep you up at night?
… The CG is building up a collection of use cases.
… Is there something concrete that will lead to real action in the publishing activity?
liisamk: We had talks mostly about detailed accessibility stuff that people are worried about.
… Cristina brought up the fact that we gathered a lot of info from TPAC and got a good report from Wendy and Mateus.
… Have people really spend meaningful time with that?
… We should surface some of those issues and pursue them.
Daihei: Big discussion of going to ISO with EPUB 3.3.
… The Japanese publishing industry supports the W3C rec.
… Even without the Japanese government accepting it, the publishing industry supports the rec.
… Maybe we don't need to worry about the ISO standard issue once EPUB 3.3 becomes a rec.
… In a recent meeting there was no disagreement on this.
… We are looking at getting other publishing organizations to support this in Japan:
… relying on EPUB 3.3 Recs and not needing ISO.
wendyreid: We had some conversations with Cristina because this is a big issue in the EU.
… It's good to know Japan is fine with the W3C rec, which we've aligned with the EU EAA requirements.
<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to ask if going to ISO is problematic
wendyreid: There's still a question whether we should go to ISO or just stick with rec?
tzviya: Does Japan have a problem with ISO?
Daihei: The issue was that there is no need, but not whether it would be a problem.
… Currently EPUB 3.2 is going to be released in April as an ISO standard.
… JIS--Japan Industry Specification--is supposed to align with ISO.
… That means JIS may make EPUB 3.2 the standard.
… But this can take years.
… Practically speaking, there is no synchronization necessary by EPUB 3.3, including JIS.
tzviya: Current W3C process is more speedy than the previous one.
… If Japan doesn't _require_ synchronization then we can just point to it.
AvneeshSingh: The whole point of going to ISO is to prevent fragementation.
… The main bottleneck is the political issues re the EAA.
… Ultimately, the issue is whether there is HARM going to ISO.
… If there is no harm, then it's good to have all the standards synchronized around the world.
tzviya: The education task force has been working on use cases.
… I've been working on one on courses with Rick.
… I would like to see more participation in that CG.
… Any ideas?
liisamk: I don't have anything specific in mind.
… We do need to pursue some of the issues, find a small group of people who want to talk about it.
… There are at least 2 or 3 issues that would work.
tzviya: One big issue is the concept of page numbers and locators.
… Nellie is doing a recording on this, which will be terrific. We should publicize that.
… Locators, annotations, bookmarks, notes, etc. etc. are all needed and have been talked about for a long time.
… Some of the problem is RS limitations,
… some that ebooks are not just in browsers;
… plus the implementations in RSs are variable despite the fact that there is a web spec for annotation.
… We aren't going to rewrite an existing standard.
wendyreid: There are a lot of problems, or themes of problems like these that come up.
… Speaking as an RS, we have our own implementations of annotations etc.
… There is a movement looking for better interoperability.
… A big catch is the DRM issue. It's really hard to move books and data around because of DRM:
… the current frameworks (note plural) we use for DRM.
… At the NNELS Accessible Publishing Summit, the issue of audiobook accessibility came up.
… Our audiobooks rec doesn't get into this much.
… Something like EPUB Accessibility 1.1 is really needed for audiobooks.
liisamk: Page numbers is a good place to start because there are a lot of people who don't know how to do page numbers,
… what are best practices re page numbering wrt accessibility, especially when words break over pages.
… When we say a11y for audiobooks and commercially sold audiobooks not being accessible, what does that mean?
wendyreid: They don't have frontmatter and endmatter or meaningful navigation, for example.
<tzviya> http://
wendyreid: Image descriptions are not provided. Plus the most common supplemental content is PDFs.
<tzviya> https://
<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to talk about watermarking
Tzviya: here are links from the DAISY KB and from Nellie McKesson on this.
… Also, re DRM: I wrote up something about this for Wiley a couple of years ago.
… Got close to getting Wiley to move away from DRM to watermarking.
… We're unlikely to convert people to alternatives like watermarking.
… There are plenty of tools for watermarking available. We don't want to support specific commercial tools.
… We can't do much more than simply advocate.
Around the Room
tzviya: Avneesh, Wendy has just asked the CG TF to do a spec for audiobooks a11y.
… Let's have a call between you, me, and Wendy on this.
liisamk: Where we have to start with that audiobook a11y conversation is to help people understand the issues.
… The audiobooks folks see their work being very separate from both print and the ebook.
… Lots of things in those formats are not included in the audiobooks.
… Would anybody actually want the FM, BM, and Index spoken out in an audiobook?
… The big issue in audiobooks is AI-generated voice, which is not the same as TTS.
… Our job is really explaining what is needed and why it is important.
wendyreid: Fundamentally, it's the right thing to do. We don't want to lock people out of experiences. It's about giving users choices.
… Users will buy the format they want. We are telling a subset of users that we don't care about their needs.
… Some people use audiobooks because the like them; some people HAVE to use them.
… People don't have that different users have different needs and different expectations.
… Publishers need to be more thoughtful and more flexible.
… You no longer need to make a human speak an index because AI can do it now.
… Also, people assume there's no audience for things for which there really is.
AvneeshSingh: We have DAISY members who have deep and broad experience in this.
… Mapping everything in a traditional DAISY book may be overkill; we may need to find a middle ground.
… At that time, it was old technology. That has changed significantly now.
… wendyreid: Absolutely. There has to be a middleground between _everything_ has to be included an _nothing_, which is what we have now.
tzviya: This is fundamental. We have long recognized the importance of making things skippable.
… There shouldn't be a barrier to including things that can be skipped.
… This is a fertile area for discussion.