WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Html from a .pdf file, what is the best way?

for

From: Christophe Strobbe
Date: Apr 13, 2010 9:27AM


Hi,

In response to comments on DAISY in Sean's message and several other ones...


At 08:35 9/04/2010, Sean Keegan wrote:
>(...)
>With respect to DAISY vs. HTML - the advantage DAISY offers is that of
>page navigation (i.e., you can enter the page number you want and
>instantly go to that "page"). There are free plug-ins for MS Word as
>well as Open Office that allows for the creation of a DAISY XML book
>or even a full-text/full-audio DAISY book. More information about
>conversion tools at: http://www.daisy.org/tools/conversion

Note that this page is not fully up to date. For example, new
releases of the OpenOffice.org extension - now called odt2daisy -
were made in 9 November last year and 10 April 2010. See
<http://odt2daisy.sourceforge.net/>;.


>Ron S. has already outlined some of the advantages in a previous
>message so I will not repeat here. One thing to keep in mind is that
>the text information in a DAISY file is a XHTML document. So, you are
>still dealing with (X)HTML regardless of you choice between DAISY or a
>Web page. Some people I have met create a DAISY book, and then copy
>out the XHTML file and then add in some customized CSS to
>differentiate the two versions. Site visitors are then offered
>different versions for consumption (much like Web pages that have a
>PDF link for users to download).

In DAISY 2.x, the text content is really HTML, but this is not the
case in DAISY 3.0, which also supports MathML and SVG. The
OpenOffice.org extension mentioned above outputs both DAISY 2.02 and
DAISY 3.0 (and since the latest release also playlists for media
players). When you export to DAISY, this extension allows you to
create a CSS file for viewing the DAISY 3 XML in a web browser that
supports XML (i.e. most modern standards-compliant browsers). Of
course, using a software-based DAISY player gives you more options,
for example navigation. For a list of DAISY players (some of which
are browser extensions), see the Wikipedia article on DAISY at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAISY_Digital_Talking_Book>;.

Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe


--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
---
"Better products and services through end-user empowerment"
http://www.usem-net.eu/
---
Please don't invite me to LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup or other
"social networks". You may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but
I haven't.