- [Marisa] Hi, everyone. My name is Marisa DeMeglio and I'm a software developer at the DAISY Consortium here to talk about my current project called Accessible Books on the Web. The goal of this project is to create an accessible reading experience completely within a web browser. Last year, the DAISY board approved a strategic project for exploring how to leverage native web technologies for providing a DAISY reading experience in the web browser. One part of this effort was to create videos from DAISY books and this is currently being beta tested by ATDO and Hiroshi Kalamara. The part of the project though that I'm going to talk about now is how to create a browser-ready content to offer texts and texts + audio accessible reading experiences. So what is an accessible reading experience? It gives users control over navigation, visual adjustments like adjusting font size or colour contrast, and playback of synchronised audio with corresponding text highlights. The book that we're going to look at today is called "Action for Heroes: A guide to help adults talk to children about COVID-19." A special thanks to Depender Mendocha and Prashant Verma for providing this DAISY book. So we can see a DAISY player. This is Amis, which many of you are familiar with. I certainly am. And we can see what this accessible reading experience is like traditionally. - [computer] "Action for Heroes." - We have text highlight. - [computer] Guide for heart-to-heart chats with children to accompany reading of "My Hero is You." Adults benefit from listening to children. - Contents navigation. - [computer] Benefits from listening. - Changing the font size. - [computer] Adults ask open questions to invite children to talk about what they know. As the children speak, and they recognise the adult is listening. - And changing the audio playback rate. - [computer] Continue to share their ideas, thoughts and feelings. Adult can listen patiently to all children know about the virus, some of their information. - So this is great, but it does require specialised software and this requirement limits who we can reach because not all users may have the necessary resources. They may also not have the technical proficiency to download, instal and configure specialised reading software. So what if instead we follow the web model and let the content itself be the interface, meaning that we build the controls for reading into the book itself. This means that the browser is our target platform and the web is our language. Luckily, everyone already has a web browser and they already know how to use it. Web browsers are great at presenting pages of structured text, and they provide a reasonably consistent experience across devices and languages. Transforming our content from DAISY or EPUB format into pure web content is very feasible because our content is already based on web technologies and web accessibility best practises are already there. So that same book that we saw on the DAISY player has been transformed into HTML files with built-in reading controls. We can see here a screenshot of a web browser with a transformed page from that book. It's an HTML file, open in a browser. Most of the window is occupied by the book content and in the corners, there are icons offering controls over the reading experience. So I'm just going to play some short videos here that show different features. The first one is showing how you navigate from chapter to chapter, using small arrow controls for links in the lower right. The next video, showing how you can browse the table of contents. There's a sidebar and you have access to all of the different sections and you can pick one and then it loads. The next thing is showing go to page, so if you have a book with print pages listed, you can go to the pages tab of the sidebar, enter a page number or select it from the list and go there. You can search the full text of the book. Again in the sidebar, go under search, type in your search and you get the results. Click on a result and it goes there and it highlights the search result. You can set bookmarks. What we see in the book content is a small link icon has been added after every heading. So you can click that icon. It loads the address in the address bar and then you can just bookmark it with your browser. You can make different adjustments. So what we see here is that there is a dark mode on the screen, but if you want to change it, you go into settings and you select or de-select it. So now I've deselected it, selected it again, you can change the scale to make the font and the buttons bigger. Next thing, most importantly, maybe the most exciting, is audio synchronisation feature so you can see text highlight with audio playback. - [computer] Key message, one staying healthy. Chat One, let's chat. Before we get into the story more- - I check the settings. I can change the playback rate. - [computer] Tell me what you already know about the virus. A child is sitting on his father's lap. Father is sincerely and patiently listening- - And using some of the navigation controls, I can go to the previous or next traits. - [computer] The coronavirus is fake. The Corona virus kills people. - Even more features are possible. We could look at Text-to-Speech via the Web Speech API, being able to download a book to read it offline, and things like advanced bookmarking and annotation. The web platform is fully equipped to do all these things with the caveat that Web Speech is currently experimental, but being developed. So how did this happen? I wrote an automatic conversion script to get from EPUB to what you just saw. So you can go from DAISY 2.02 into EPUB using the DAISY pipeline already established, very stable, and then use a script like this, which is currently in prototype phase, we hope to develop it further, use a script like this to go from EPUB into what you just saw. Under the hood, this script simply created a folder of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. You can see a screenshot of the file set here. It's fairly straightforward and self-explanatory. I'd be happy to answer more questions about this as we go forward, and going forward, what's next? So like I said, we're currently in the prototype phase for both the user interface and the script to convert the content. The next will be developing production-ready tools if funding is available. So please follow the project, GitHub.com/daisy/accessible-books-on-the-web, with a hyphen in between each of those words, accessible-books-on-the-web, and just feel free to contact me with any questions. Thank you very much.