After months of development I am happy to announce that we have launched the first completed version of the Open XML to DAISY translator.  This represents the output of a great partnership between DAISY, Sonata Software (one of our incredibly talented development partners), and Microsoft. I think all of us agree that it’s tremendously exciting to be able to get this technology out in the wild so that people can start using it to achieve the things we envisioned when construction started last year. 

There is already a great example of practical usage taking place this week in South Africa.  Using the Save as DAISY translator and the newly launched DAISY Pipeline, trainers are teaching classes of people to convert HIV/AIDs manuals and educational material into DAISY.  This is a great example of using DAISY for more than just the extremes of “print disabilities”.  People who can’t read and that otherwise would have no access to this critical information are able to educate themselves about potentially life threatening issues.  Seeing technology used in this manner is the most fulfilling feeling to anyone who does this for a living. 

Of course, it’s also exciting to see the amount of content and momentum with DAISY rapidly increase with the expansion of sites like bookshare.org and Braillenet. 

We have produced a short video to help people understand the technology.  Rather than embed the video here I have chosen to provide a link to the site where they are hosted.  There you will be able to find the video in numerous languages including Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, French, Spanish, and English.  To check the videos out go here:

http://www.youtube.com/openxml                             

Most importantly, you can download the final version of the translator here: 

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=208610

I really hope that some of the many developers who are out building solutions for Open XML will consider incorporating technology like this into their solutions.  We hosted our translator on SourceForge for this very reason.  We really want developers to have best in class resources when it comes to understanding and innovating on accessibility for Open XML.

To top it off, I am also very happy to say that we have already started to plan the next version of the translator.  We are already working closely with DAISY and Sonata to gather requirements so please feel free to post ideas here. 

With that, get out there and create some DAISY books for the world!

-Reed

PS

DAISY has new released a new version of the Pipeline and it too is a really impressive accomplishment.  Head to www.daisy.org to learn more. 

Alas, I have neglected my blogging duties these past few weeks as I have been travelling around the clock.  I owe some people some information and resources and so will have that up over the course of this week. 

First, I wanted to provide everyone with an update of our activities at CSUN this coming week (I am in LA now).  We have a ton of exciting sessions and events this week and I encourage you all to attend if you can.   On Wednesday evening we are going to be holding an event at which we will be launching some exciting new technologies and  opportunities for the community.  There will be some great speakers and this is the best place to come and get a great overview of where Microsoft is headed with accessibility.  I actually envision that this event will fill up pretty quickly (room for a couple hundred) so it might be wise to show up a little early.  Here are the details:

Microsoft Accessible Technology Event

 4PM – 6PM, Wednesday, March 12^th

Los Angeles Airport Hilton, Pacific Ballroom

5711 West Century Blvd

In addition to this event, we are going to be hosting/participating in a number of sessions: 

·         “DAISY Production from a Text Source” (Me and a host of other great speakers) Friday 3/14, 2008- 1:50 PM 

·         “AGE-RELATED “PROBLEMS” WITH E-MAIL, WEB BROWSING AND WORD PROCESSING ET AL”  (Gary Moulton) Sat 3/15 - 8:00am

·         “Accessibility for Simple to Moderate Complexity DHTML Web Sites ” (Cynthia Shelley) Sat 3/15 – 10:40am

·         “Building Accessible Websites Using MOSS 2007 and the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint” (Dana Simberkoff – HiSoftware) Sat 3/15 - 9:20am

·         “The Internet Captioning Forum: AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, WGBH Tackle Online Captioning” (Sean Hayes) Thurs 3/13 – 4:20pm

·         “Accessibility test tools for MSAA and UI Automation” (Peter Lakov) Sat 3/15 - 9:20am

I am looking forward to an incredibly busy and exciting week.

Cool Accessibility Thing of the Week

I thought I would kick of this section to highlight some of the great efforts that partners, individuals, insitutions and others are undertaking.  Going forward, please leave suggestions/thoughts for this section in the comments.  The winner this week is Claro Software.  Claro has a lot of awesome products but they did something truly amazing by making their screen reader, Thunder, FREE for home use.  It’s a really high quality tool.  If you want to read more go to http://www.screenreader.net/ or http://www.clarosoftware.com

-Reed

Early this coming week, I will be headed to Orlando for the ATIA 2008 Conference.  I will be speaking on a few topics (including the DAISY translator) at the Microsoft Education stage that we are setting up this year (I will add the full schedule for the stage to this post tomorrow); however, the real benefit of being at ATIA is the chance to talk to all of our great partners and engage with a good group of users.  In addition to all of the folks headed down from our central accessibility group at Microsoft, I will be joined by Ben Wilde who is our program manager looking after most of our accessibility work in Office V-next.  Ben has been trying to setup time with partners for us to sit down and talk but that said, if you want to talk directly with people from Office and give us your feedback either feel free to stop me randomly at ATIA or to leave a comment and we will try and setup some time.  

-Reed

Well, January 25^th is upon us and I am happy to announce that if you head over to the project site on SourceForge, the first release (v1, alpha, M1, low grade dog food without gravy, etc) is ready to try out.  Keep in mind that it is going to have some holes right now but we know about a lot of them and already have plans to fix those.  That said; if you find bugs, PLEASE log them on SourceForge (again, I am going to call out the biggest contributors and maybe even send them a nice prize so please get involved).  Now without further ado, let’s drill into some details around this first release. 

What’s in it?

This first release isn’t going to hit all of the DAISY elements (yet) but we managed to hammer out a pretty good bucket.  The work that Sonata and DAISY are doing here is truly incredible.  Here is what we support in V1:

·         Dublin Core Metadata [R1]

·         UID metadata [R2]

·         Frontmatter,bookmatter and rearmatter mapping[R3]

·         Levels and Headings [R4]

·         Paragraphs [R5]

·         Tables [R7]

·         Lists  [R8]

·         Note’s and Note References  [R10]

·         Emphasis and Strong [R11]

·         Superscript and Subscript [R12]

·         Images [R14]

·         Validity [R16]

·         Captions [R18]

Now, if you ask me that’s not bad for a first pass.  But I also want to be completely up front about some of the issues we know are out there. We know there are some defects in v1 and you can find that list up on SourceForge.  It shouldn’t be that hard to fix most of these, but check them out if you find yourself running into a problem again and again.  There is also going to be a trouble shooting document available so try consulting that as well.  In fact, here is a list of everything up on the project site:

In this release we have uploaded the following:

1.       Setup for Microsoft Word 2007

2.       Setup for Microsoft Word 2003

3.       Setup for Microsoft Word XP

4.       Source Code

5.       Instruction Manual

6.       Authoring Guidelines

7.       Troubleshooting Guidelines

8.       Build verification testing results

9.       Open Defects

10.   Open Suggestions

I also want to point out that as a content author, you need to take some things into consideration to make a great DAISY file.  The canonical example of course is alt text.  Guess what, we can take your picture files and convert them over no problem, but if the alt text field isn’t populated, there isn’t any way to guess what your image might be (I am also not sure you want us guessing what your image is all the time anyway).  Because I brought this up, I should call out how to add alt text to an image or other objects in Office 2007.  It’s located in the size option when you right click on any image.  To get to this option via keyboard ensure that you have focus on an image or object and then the keystrokes are Alt, “J”,”P”.  That puts focus on the picture tools tab.  Then press “S”, “Z” to launch the size dialogue. Then hit the right arrow once and you are on the alt text option.  Don’t forget about things like using styles properly, logical document structure and so on (this is going to be another post).  Also, you will need the compatability pack if you are on anything prior to 2007.

I also want to call out the results of the first test cases.  I can’t say enough great things about the folks from the DAISY consortium and Sonata who are collaborating with us on this effort.  Check this out:

325 out of 328 test cases passed.  That’s pretty darn good (we are going after that pesky 1% that failed).  The details on the test cases will also be found on SourceForge so feel free to chomp on that as well.

So again, go here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy/.  Play with it, bash it, and drop all your feedback so that we can make this as good as possible.  I hope you are pleased with this first drop and let me know if you have ideas.

-Reed

It's late here in Redmond (about 9:30PM) but there is a lot going and I am incredibly stoked about the release of the beta tomorrow.  I've been combing the test results today and additional documentation.  In short, I couldn't be happier with the work Sonata and the DAISY consortium have done so far. I will have a longer update and details here at some point tomorrow. 

More so than any other topic, I really want to focus this blog on accessibility because working in this area is by far the most rewarding part of my job (It’s not like service packs and Word aren’t fun.  To be blunt, it’s just that thought of making technology usable for more people really makes me happy).  To that end I thought I would cover two things in this post.  First, I started off with a bit on how and why we think about accessibility so much in the Office group. This post ends with an update on the progress of the DAISY translator work (and what YOU can do to get involved and help in this effort). 

Office and Accessibility: Why?

One thing that continues to surprise me as I do more and more work around accessibility is the lack of awareness.  The typical conversation goes something like:

Curious Jon: So what do you do at Microsoft?

Reed: I drive A, B, and most importantly, our accessibility work for Office.

Curious Jon: What is accessibility?

Typically we then launch  into a long discussion about all the technologies out there, who it impacts, legal ramifications and so on; however, I think one area we tend to undersell is the “who it impacts” category and so I thought this would be a great place to start.  Assistive Technology (AT) will touch just about everyone at some point in their life.  Consider the following from a study done by Forester a few years back:

In the 2003 we find that tens of millions of working age adults have a need for assistive technology.  Considering that this is the U.S. alone where there is good medical treatment, decent education system, etc. you can quickly extrapolate just how big of a need this is on the global scale.  Factoring in nations like China with billions of people or countries in Africa that could utilize existing AT to aid with things like illiteracy (That’s right, there is AT out there for that!) the market need as an aggregate quickly races into the hundreds of millions of people.  The realization that there are that many people in need is like being hit in the gut by Mike Tyson in his heyday.  Today, around the world, there are hundreds of millions of people who could work, learn, explore, and even live better. 

The challenge is even more interesting when you consider it’s only going to get more complicated.  The same issues that face sectors like health care, social security, etc. also impact technology.  Unsurprisingly, Forester found that the need for assistive technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next few years.  Just like any other major public sector, as the working population ages and the general computer user population consists of a larger ratio of older users (The same study clearly demonstrates that older users have more of a need assistive technology, in my grandmother’s and parents case this assistive technology is known as Reed’s cell phone number) the demands for specialized support go up dramatically.   

So in the Office group, there are two key reasons we are focusing so many resources in this area.  Number one, ensuring that all people have access to technology is one of our core goals as a company.  At Microsoft, our mission is to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.  I can’t think of a single area where more impact can be made than accessibility.  The second reason is business opportunity.  With hundreds of millions of people in the world desperate for a better computing experience, there is a lot that can be done to address this market.  This is also one of the things I want to evangelize more in 2008.  While companies should be working on accessibility because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do (and in many cases the law) the best driver of innovation is business potential.  If we can show more people this is the case then more competitors, partners, and members of various communities will start innovating and creating new tools.   I will certainly be covering more on this topic in the future (the market for assistive technology) but wanted to get this intro out first.  

DAISY Update

It’s been just over a month since we announced the DAISY translator and we have made some tremendous progress.  The work that Sonata, DAISY, and Microsoft are doing here is truly incredible.  I am pleased to announce that first version of the translator produced valid DAISY XML just a few days ago.  George Kerscher of DAISY did it himself using Office 2003, the compatibility pack, and the translator. 

Even better news is that the first beta (our milestone 1, alpha if you will) is going to be available on SourceForge on January 25^th.  I want to call out that some of the DAISY elements aren’t working quite yet in the alpha but will be added later.  Some other things are rough around the edges but we want to make sure that anyone who wants to can test, provide feedback, and get involved early on.   The URL for the page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy/.   Please hop on there and log any bugs, thoughts, etc. that you might have.   I will be using my site to call out key contributors, milestones, and other updates so check back here frequently for announcements on the project. 

-Reed

PS

Please excuse the somewhat barren look of my blog right now.  I am playing with the CSS tonight and should it have it all pretty and good to go in a few days.