The ACP 08 programme aimed to cover several different areas, looking at important concepts and ideas, and offering practical demonstrations of new services and technologies.
THURSDAY 6 NOVEMBER
09:40 - 09:50
Welcome to ACP08 (MS Word)
Maarten Verboom - Director DEDICON, The Netherlands
09:50 - 10:15
Keynote speech
Mainstreaming adaptive information processing; achievements and lessons of the DAISY for All Project (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Hiroshi Kawamura - President of the DAISY Consortium
The DAISY Consortium was given the ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award 2008 in recognition of its good practices to implement the WSIS Plan of Actions and strong support for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The speaker will address the achievements and challenges of the global implementation of DAISY standards for equitable access to information by persons with disabilities with special reference to critical global issues to be most effectively tackled by mainstreaming of accessible contents processing, such as promotion of indigenous peoples’ language and culture, disaster preparedness of the community as a whole, and combating against illiteracy.
10:15 - 10:45
The Future of eBook Publishing and Mainstream Applications of New Technologies (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Sander van Kempen - Pinion, NDC/VBK Publishers, The Netherlands
Sander van Kempen has been involved in eBook publishing for many years and is currently director of eBook.nl (part of NDC/VBK publishers). Though eBooks did not live up to the high promises some people did have at the start, recent developments as the Amazon Kindle, iRex Iliad and the Sony eReader have brought new attention to eBooks. Sander will put these developments into perspective and tell about the actual efforts needed to produce eBooks from the material publishers use for the printed versions. He will highlight the practical issues he encounters, when getting material from publishers and rights issues to solve. He will also talk about how current efforts to make eBooks for the mainstream market can help to produce adapted versions for the visually impaired.
10.45 - 11.00
Coffee Break
11:00 - 13:00
Special Thematic Session: Adaptive Content Processing for Educational Environments
Chair:
Reinhard Ruemer - Integrated Study, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
The Institute Integriert Studieren (IS) is an Austria-wide Institute for Information Systems Supporting Print Disabled Students. The institute is involved in the Austrian wide production of teaching and learning materials for blind and visually handicapped students in primary and secondary schools. IS is also involved in teachers’ education, especially concerning IT usage in integrated education.
11.00 - 11.05
Introduction
Reinhard Ruemer - Integrated Study, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
11.05 - 11.30
Findings and issues in converting publishers’ output files into accessible versions for users with reading impairments (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Cristina Mussinelli - Associazione Italiana Editori (AIE), Italy
The Associazione Italiana Editori (Italian Publishers Association) is the trade association for Italian and foreign publishers operating in Italy or who publish books, magazines and digital products in Italian.
• The idea of grouping publishers and conversion companies in order to test the conversion processes required for different kinds of content stems from the achievements of the Pro Access workshop held in Venice on January 2008 which gathered representatives of publishing industries, blind organizations and experts in conversion activities.
11.30 - 11.55
MyWay (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Alberto Juhe - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Office of Learning Technologies, Spain
The UOC Office of Learning Technologies follows a User Centered Design (UCD) approach which consists of implementing design processes in which end users influence how a design takes shape.
• MyWay is a set of tools to edit and deliver content in different formats. After three years of development, the UOC wants to open and transform the project with the objective to be helpful to the open learning community.
11.55 - 12.20
Publishing Scholarly Journals in Universal Format- Physicists Take the Lead (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
A short video demonstration can be downloaded as well (swf).
Emilia Persoon - Dedicon & Dorine in 't Veld - Viewplus Technologies, The Netherlands
• The American Physical Society and ViewPlus Technologies have completed a proof-of-principle research project on the feasibility of publishing American Physical Society journals in a universally accessible DAISY format. They have shown definitively that it is possible to do so at little additional cost. The results of that study will be discussed briefly, and accessible DAISY articles from Physical Review Letters will be demonstrated.
12.20 - 12.45
A wiki as a tool for designing and editing online learning materials (pdf) (MS Word)
Orland Cardona Perez - EAPC - Public Administration School of Catalonia, Spain
• The Public Administration School of Catalonia has chosen a DokuWiki for the design and edition of training materials linked to courses of administrative background, subject to frequent regulation changes. The reasons that have driven forward this decision are described in this article as well as the advantages in the improvement of several aspects of the process of education and learning.
Parallel Sessions 14:00 - 17:00
Track One: Enabling Users to obtain Accessible Content
Chair: Simon Ball - JISC Techdis, United Kingdom
JISC Techdis is supporting the education sector in achieving greater accessibility and inclusion by stimulating innovation and providing exert advice and guidance on disability and technology.
14.00 - 14.10
Introduction
Simon Ball - JISC Techdis, United Kingdom
14.10 - 14.30
The Accessibility Passport – a dialogue between user and designer (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Simon Ball - JISC Techdis, United Kingdom
• The Accessibility Passport has been developed to enable a dialogue between the specifier, developer, tester (including teacher/tutor) and user (student) of software or learning objects in development. By stating the original brief, the specifier can express what accessibility requirements were, or were not, expected to be included. The developer can outline any accessibility features built in and any user testing undertaken. Crucially users of the software or learning object (teachers and learners) can communicate their experiences back into the development process for future modifications or adaptations.
14.30 - 14.50
Accessibility from Scratch (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Reinhard Ruemer - Integrated Study, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
• Adaptive content production as well as delivery technologies and services have been continuously expanding over the last years. Multi-purpose software suites to organise, archive, index, display, transport, and retrieve the increasing amount of digital data face an increasing demand.
By providing on the one side, advanced audio-visual search services, efficient presentation and navigation mechanisms and on the other side content production tools developed with the creative industries, EUAIN based infrastructure approaches can shorten the gap in the audio-visual market sector between Europe and the US.
14.50 – 15.10
Enabling Accessible Resource Access via Service Providers (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Alexander Haffner & Gerhard Weber - Technical University of Dresden, Germany
• Libraries have become digitized and are using information technology for storing and managing their media inventory. Additional metadata is used for describing properties of non-digital media objects as well as of purely digital resources. As the amount of digital resources in particular increases, there is demand for centralized services for search and distribution of content.
15.10 - 15.30
Making it Easier to Obtain Alternative Formats of Texts (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Simon Ball - JISC Techdis, United Kingdom & Alicia Wise - Publishers Licensing Society, United Kingdom
• The JISC TechDis Service has joined forces with The Publishers’ Association and the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) to provide resources which have the potential to transform the delivery of learning materials to disabled students and staff. These two resources, will support the delivery of materials in alternative formats to meet the needs of people with a range of disabilities, a crucial requirement for equality of access for all students and staff in education and research.
Publisher Lookup UK will enable education providers and publishers to source electronic formats of textbooks for students with disabilities more quickly and efficiently than the current processes allow. Currently, publishers generally provide one of two digital formats – either an e-book or a PDF – but sourcing more accessible formats can be a complex undertaking both from the publishers’ and the users’ point of view. Publisher Lookup UK provides mechanisms for simplifying request, delivery and access mechanisms between the education and research sectors and UK publishers. The site currently provides links to over 150 imprints and additional guidance on making PDFs accessible to users with a range of disabilities.
The Guide to Obtaining Textbooks in Alternative Formats – is designed to provide guidance to teaching, learner support and library staff or anyone who needs to provide text books in alternative formats for reading impaired learners. Disability law protects disabled learners by requiring institutions to make adequate provision for disabled students, including the provision of alternative formats in a timely manner. People with a range of disabilities benefit from alternative formats and many learners with disabilities are struggling with traditional texts despite alternatives being available.
15.30 - 15.40
Coffee Break
15.40 - 16.00
The Fastest Track to Daisy Publishing: www.daisymarkup.com (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Niels Thogersen - XML-TEKST, Denmark
• Printed material can become accessible for blind, visually impaired and dyslexic persons in the Daisy-format, and we are presenting a web-service, that will make it easy to convert books and other content into accessible Daisy-projects.
16.00 - 16.20
Multilingual Support in Infty Software, Part I (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word) Multilingual Support in Infty Software, Part II (MS Powerpoint)
Dr Katsuhito Yamaguchi - Nihon University & Dr Masakazu Suzuki - Kyushu University, Japan
• The math OCR system, "InftyReader" and the accessible math-document editor, "ChattyInfty" enable visually disabled people to access printed scientific materials. Blind individuals not only can read but also author scientific documents including complicated math expressions using ChattyInfty. Here, multilingual support in Infty software is mainly discussed.
16.20 - 16.40
LAGUNTXO, a flexible intelligent tutoring system to improve the quality of life of the people with cognitive disabilities (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
J. Rubio - Fundación LEIA, Spain
• In order to face the problems that people with disabilities find in their daily life, and especially in their working environment in a very competitive market, one of the keys is the implementation of solutions that new technology offers in the form of what experts call "Support Technology". The development of flexible and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) based on mobile platforms and providing adaptable content offers new perspectives in the integration of people with disabilities. These tutoring systems are adaptable to the users and they compensate user’s disabilities improving the personal performance and the training.
16.40 - 17.00
Guidelines for licenses to provide accessible material in compliance with copyright and related rights (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Olga Martin Sancho - Federation of European Publishers, Belgium
• ProAccess is a "network of networks" project funded under the Digital Literacy strand from within the eLearning strand of the Commission. The project will roll out EUAIN (www.euain.org) results and ORMEE (www.ormee.net). The solutions proposed are based on common collaboration and in order to succeed, it is important to facilitate the legal instruments devoted to help all actors in the book value chain guarantee respect of copyright in particular on digital versions. In order to encourage the promotion of licensing and contractual arrangements in this field, guidelines have been finalised to assist publishers when drafting licenses to provide accessible material.
Parallel Sessions 14:00 - 17:00
Track Two: Adaptive publishing for people with print impairments
Chair: George Kerscher - Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium
14.00 - 14.10
Introduction
George Kerscher - Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium
14.10 - 14.30
A Sea-change in published works delivery: is it really possible? (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Mandy Thompson - Senior Manager Production Services, RNIB & Jim Russell - Independent Project Manager & Alicia Wise - Publishers Licensing Society, United Kingdom
• Only 5 per cent of books published every year are ever made available in any format other than standard print. This means that a majority of blind, partially-sighted and other print-disabled people have difficulty accessing the majority of publications. Publishers in the UK and RNIB are working together to change this and bring to life the vision of a visually impaired person being able to walk into a bookshop and buy a book in the format they can read. This presentation will explore how we're doing it, what we've already achieved and what still needs to be done.
14.30 - 14.50
Accessible Pdf (MS Word)
Roel van Houten - Viziris, The Netherlands
14.50 - 15.10
MEDIBUS – ACP projects in Germany (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Dr. Thomas Kahlisch - Director German Central Library for the Blind Leipzig (DZB), Secretary IFLA Libraries for the Blind Section
• MEDIBUS is an organization of the German speaking talking book and Braille libraries, who have already established a cooperative project for the production and distribution of standardized DAISY content. Like the DAISY Consortium, the ultimate vision of MEDIBUS is that all books in every library should be available in DAISY format. Presently, there are above 20,000 titles available produced by the member organizations. In 2010, the number of titles will be 30,000 and the distribution service of audio cassettes will come to an end.
15.10 - 15.30
Hybrid Book Production, Collaboration between Specialist Organisation and Publisher (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Alexander Baars & Edmar Schut - Dedicon, The Netherlands
• A presentation of the collaboration between Dutch Publishing Company Malmberg and Dedicon, the Dutch organisation for information provision in accessible formats on the production of hybrid books.
15.40 - 16.00
Transfer of old relief maps into Internet environment Some issues faced during the conversion of the Braille index of "Weltatlas mit 34 Reliefkarten von Paul Georgi" (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Jurand B. Czermiński - University of Gdańsk, Poland
• Cartographic materials are known for their complex, flattened 3-D nature and irregularity of information content. These features were always a challenge for blind students. Although the materials are known to be the first to implement well defined and organized scalability – their tactile 'equivalents’ do not necessarily follow the same rules. For this reason a blind user should be aware of the real or possible peculiarities of the embossed material. This paper describes the main steps undertaken in an academic institution in order to revitalize an old atlas of 34 relief maps embossed in 1966 by Deutsche Zentralbücherei für Blinde zu Leipzig (formerly German Democratic Republic) and stored in the Department of Rare Materials of the university library, accompanied by a 'classic’ German Braille 184-page index.
16.00 – 16.20
An automated workflow to publish accessible scientific papers: integrating Daisy Pipeline within Dspace (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Mireia Ribera - Universitat de Barcelona Department of Library and Information Science, Spain
• This paper presents a prototype plugin "Daisy4DSpace" of using DFMC Daisy Pipeline tools to integrate automated format conversions within DSPace (an open source digital repository).
On the one hand DSpace offers the author a platform to submit originals in different word processing formats like MS Word, to describe originals’ metadata and to manage digital rights. On the other hand, Daisy Pipeline offers the conversion tools from MS Word format to other formats such as PDF for large print, accessible HTML format, DAISY with audio, etc. At the end, Daisy4DSpace plugin builds a bridge between Daisy pipeline conversion tools and DSpace digital repository, showing the benefits of the integration of both tools to improve the accessibility of scientific articles.
16.20 - 17.00
Accessible PDF Using Adobe Acrobat and InDesign (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Greg Pisocky - Adobe, USA
• Accessible PDF documents using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat. The PDF format offers many accessibility features that document authors can take advantage of when offering PDF documents. This session will highlight the authoring techniques that should be used to create PDF documents, how to test documents for accessibility, and what end user experience for users with various disabilities can be expected.
FRIDAY 7 NOVEMBER
Plenary 09:30 - 09:50
Short introduction & Activities of the EUAIN Network (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
David Crombie - Co-ordinator EUAIN Network
09:50 - 10:15
The Future of Content Personalisation (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Andy Heath - Open University, UK
Parallel Sessions 10.45 - 13.00
Track One: New environments for accessible information processing
Chair: George Ioannidis - IN2
10.45 - 10.50
Introduction
George Ioannidis - IN2
10.50 - 11.15
The Internet of Things and Services (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Atta Badii - University of Reading, United Kingdom
• The concept of the 'Internet of Things and Services’ is based on the possibility of seamless integration of physical objects and services via automatic identification of things, discovery of Things & Services, communication, service selection and composition, resolution and invocation of services.
The key enabling research and commercially available technologies that underpin the Internet of Things & Services paradigm include middleware and service-oriented architectures, virtualisation, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), sensor networking technologies, semantic data fusion, semantic-cooperative generalisation ontologies for selection and integration of services, and embedded intelligence.
11.15 - 11.40
The wearIT@work Project (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Michael Lawo - TZI, University of Bremen, Germany
• Over the past few years, digital navigation technology has rapidly found its way into daily life through a wide range of commercial applications and tools. These do not only include popular car navigation systems but also applications in entertainment, tourism, education, health and games. Unfortunately the majority of these developments are inaccessible for the visually impaired, for whom way-finding in indoor and outdoor public spaces, especially those which are new, often provides many challenges.
Previous projects have already shown that blind users can benefit from digital navigation technology, but also that there is still much room for improvement and refinement. Quite often the focus was on the technical implementation and getting the relatively new technology to work. The consequence was that there was too little focus on the user. uWEAR has tried to turn things around and to start as much as possible from the user-perspective.
11.40 – 12.05
Production Methods and Tools for Audiopublishing (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Anders Frankenberg - Dolphin Computer Access, United Kingdom
• Dolphin Computer Access creates software products that allow people with vision impairments to use mainstream information technology. Using the same products as sighted people means individuals can retain their independence. At the same time it allows prudent businesses, schools and colleges to benefit from the knowledge and ideas of people who might otherwise be excluded. Dolphin software is designed to work together with existing computer systems and standards, providing access to a wide range of Windows programs through magnification, speech and Braille.
12.05 - 12.30
Project AutoBraille (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Mikkel K Mosthaf - DBB & Lars Ballieu Christensen - Sensus, Denmark
• The Danish National Library for the Blind (DBB) in cooperation with Sensus: In the beginning of 2008, three major Braille producers in Denmark decided to enter a partnership, the purpose of which was the complete automation of the production of formatted and paginated Braille to any target media, including (but not limited to) the most popular professional and consumer embossers and displays.
12.30 - 12.55
The authoring of highly accessible texts (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
A. Colombo, L. Sbattella, & R. Tedesco - Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Providing access to complex contents is a challenge authors are required to cope with. Such challenge is particularly hard if contents have to be accessed by people with cognitive disabilities. In this paper we propose a tool (SPARTA2 ) supporting the authoring of highly accesible texts. Using the tool, a text can be tailored to meet requirements of a specific target audience. The tool in integrated with the Word 2007 user interface and is particularly easy to use.
Parallel Sessions 10.45 - 13.00
Track Two: Accessibility of Multimedia content
Chair Ted van der Togt, DEDICON
10.45 - 10.50
Introduction
by session chair
10.50 - 11.15
Synchronised content: how to use the strengths of each medium, part I (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word) Synchronised content: how to use the strengths of each medium, part II (pdf) (MS Word)
Ted van der Togt - Dedicon, The Netherlands & Mereijn van her Heijden - Sound Design & Audio Engineering, the Netherlands
• Next to textbooks, educational institutions have started to use video in an increasing way. For example: lectures can be accessed via free Internet services like iTunes-U. Lecture notes - traditionally offered by university presses - are changing too. Ted van der Togt will showcase some of the new services and their possibilities. To search video in a fine grained way, both visual impaired and not impaired users face the same challenges in that video material is not very accessible. By synchronizing transcripts, video material can be made much more usable and help to annotate and refer to parts. These developments are not unrelated to developments in accessible formats like DAISY and are expected to come together in future formats.
11.15 - 11.40
Adobe: accessible video (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
Greg Pisocky - Adobe, USA
• Accessible video for the web is increasingly important for educational, entertainment, and commercial content. In many cases, the format for rendering this video is Flash. Adobe provides components in Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional software that simplify the production of accessible video, including displaying subtitles using World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Timed Text DFXP files and offering accessible user interface controls to allow all users access to playback controls. Increasing knowledge of what is possible with Flash video on the web is necessary, both for authors and for users – this session will provide this information and will demonstrate how to handle this work with ease.
11.40 - 12.30
Frameworks, New Paradigms for Creative Research, part I (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word) Frameworks, New Paradigms for Creative Research, part II (pdf)
PFrameworks, New Paradigms for Creative Research
Paul van Zoggel & Micah Hrehovcsik - Utrecht School of the Arts, The Netherlands
• The information culture in Europe is rapidly changing and this requires corresponding adaptations within the commercial sector, especially in the training curricula of young researchers. We need to provide a focal point for discussing our emerging information design and consumption needs and to provide cross-disciplinary roadmaps and curricula which can be used within both traditional and newly emerging industry value chains.
There has been very little attention paid to the implications of information convergence from the design perspective. Some of the areas involved are HCI, Intuitive System Design, Security and Trust Architectures, Spatiality, Game Design Research, Game Design Tools, Narrative Design, DFA and Adaptive Content Processing.
Utrecht School of the Arts is the largest university of postgraduate and professional education in the arts in the Netherlands and one of the largest in Europe. Situated in the Faculty of Art, Media and Technology, the Adaptive Architectures Group (AAG) focuses on information representation theories, innovative computer science resources and contemporary insights onto the potential market of fundamentally adaptive information processing and engagement in shared frameworks.
12.30 - 12.55
People, Public Libraries, Publishers, three key partners for inclusive library services (MS Powerpoint) (MS Word)
: Marian Koren, Head of Research and International Affairs, Netherlands Public Library Association, the Netherlands
Plenary 14:00 - 17:00
Introduction
Anne Bergman-Tahon - Federation of European Publishers, Belgium
At the recent Adaptive Content Processing Conference (ACP08) in Amsterdam, we invited several key stakeholders to join a round table discussion focused on the recent EC Green Paper: Copyright in the Knowledge Economy (pdf) (MS Word). The discussion covered many different issues and concerns and provided an excellent overview of the ongoing debates.
The Green Paper focuses on the role of copyright in fostering dissemination of knowledge for research, science and education. It is intended as the starting point for a structured debate on the long-term future of copyright policy in these fields. Copyright policy has increasingly emerged as a transversal issue, involving not only the internal market and cultural policies but also information society, competition and consumer interests. The Green Paper is an attempt to organise this debate and point to future challenges in fields that have not been a focal point up to now, e.g. scientific and scholarly publishing, and the role of libraries, researchers and the persons with a disability.
The participants in the Round Table discussion were:
Anne Bergman-Tahon - Federation of European Publishers, Belgium
Cristina Mussinelli - Associazione Italiana Editori, Italy
Hiroshi Kawamura - President of the DAISY Consortium
George Kerscher - Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium
Koen Krikhaar - IFLA Libraries for the Blind section, The Netherlands
Andy Heath - Open University, United Kingdom
Roel van Houten - Viziris, The Netherlands
Dr. Thomas Kahlisch - Director, German Central Library for the Blind Leipzig (DZB), Secretary IFLA Libraries for the Blind section, Germany
Dorine in 't Veld, VIEWplus Technologies, The Netherlands