Keynote

Hiroshi Kawamura
Steering Committee Chairman, Japan DAISY Consortium
Vice President, Assistive Technology Development Organization

Thank you for the introduction. My name is Kawamura, as he just introduced me, going back 20 years. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the DAISY Consortium, and we celebrated the occasion this past May in the town hall in Stockholm, where the ceremony for the Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, etc., takes place. And to commemorate this 20th anniversary, we held a board meeting for two days in Tokyo, where a new strategy was discussed. I believe that after listening to all the lectures today, you will be able to have a more specific idea of how the DAISY Consortium will be deploying ourselves on a global scale.

Now my role is to lead you through the symposium today, explain to you the background and the content of the symposium, by sharing some information beforehand.

First, let me briefly introduce the DAISY Consortium, which is a non-profit organization established in Switzerland, to you. What kind of organization are we, and what kind of activities do we carry out?

Let's take a look at the DAISY Consortium website.

What I'm showing you now is the official website of the DAISY Consortium. This website contains a lot of information, and I think there are hardly a handful of people in the world who have actually read everything on this website. Various parts are always being updated, so if you miss it for a while, there would be a lot of information that I wouldn't even know.

Firstly, I would like to introduce the members. There is a tab that says "About Us" and it provides information about the members. So who are the members? There is a webpage where you can check the list of members as well as a map showing you where our members are. Below the map, there is a list of members in the form of a text. There are two types of members. One is the voting members, who participate in decision-making, and the other is members who would cooperate but are not involved in decision-making. Members who participate in decision-making will elect the members of the board, and board meetings will be held twice a year.

So let us look at the distribution of the members. If you look at the map of the world, in all of the continents with the exception of the Antarctica, you can see the flags of the members. There are areas where you might think have no members, for example, Nepal, but there are people there who are active in DAISY. There are people active in Mongolia, too. There are areas where people are trying very hard to place a flag. So these are the members of the DAISY Consortium.

We have many board members participating in this symposium today, and I've asked them and the staff to kindly stay for an hour after this meeting is over at 4:30, so that we can ask questions if there are any. I hope you will take the opportunity to exchange information later on.

The staff at DAISY Consortium work hard from early morning to late at night, and we really appreciate their hard work. EPUB accessibility has been developed mostly by the DAISY Consortium staff. IDPF is the organization that is actually promoting EPUB, but they only employ about 1.5 persons. DAISY Consortium has 10 times the staff of IDPF, and are scattered throughout the world. Member organizations also have their own staff, and they cooperate in developing accessibility as well. So although the DAISY Consortium is a member of the IDPF, I would like to point out that it is taking on the majority of the overwhelming work to support accessibility.

And with respect to the actual activities, we have what are called working groups, which are widely open. So if you are interested, there are working groups that you can participate in even if you are not a member. I believe making use of such opportunities would be beneficial to both parties.

Then, what kind of members are composed in Japan is the topic of the next Japan DAISY consortium.

Now let me tell you about the Japan DAISY Consortium. Members of the Consortium must pay about four million yen according to the current foreign exchange rate. They have to pay four million yen every year. With this, we are able to realize and maintain a stable employment of a world-class staff. The staff members at the Japan DAISY Consortium are on par with the engineers at IDPF, Microsoft, Google or Apple, or rather are even leading the way in taking technological initiatives in bringing accessibility to a global scale. Therefore, most of the members are constantly head-hunted by other companies offering twice or three times their salaries. So in order to have them turn down the offer and be highly motivated to work with us, we have to maintain a certain level of salary and provide them with stable employment, hence the large amount of money we ask from the members who make decisions.

The Japan DAISY Consortium consists of four organizations. To be exact, there are voting members and non-voting members within the Consortium, and the voting members are the Japan Society for Rehabilitation of Persons with Disabilities, Assistive Technology Development Organization, Nippon Light House Information and Culture Center, and the National Association of Institutions of Information Service for Visually Impaired Persons. We also have associate members: an NPO called NaD, the social welfare corporation Japan Braille Library, and supporting members from corporations such as Olympus Corporation, KGS Corporation, and CYPAC Co., Inc. Recently, we have been seeing an increasing number of individual members as well. You can participate as an individual as well as an organization, so we ask you to please join us and support the Japan DAISY Consortium.

One of the elements in the accessibility standard that the W3C and IDPF have asked the Japan DAISY Consortium to be responsible for is the ruby annotation. This is because Japan was considered as the only country which would be able to manage the technical aspect of ruby annotations, and to this end, we have decided to set up a technical committee. We are in the process of establishing a code, so we will let you know when it is ready. This committee will not only deal with ruby annotation, but will also be engaged in other accessibility technologies as well. There are all sorts of accessibility technologies that need to be developed for the Japanese language which we have to solve, and we hope that various corporations as well as organizations will participate in this endeavor.

Yesterday, we held a lecture on EPUB jointly with JEPA. There was a visitor from Hong Kong as well as from South Korea. The East Asian region shares a common culture, such as the use of Chinese characters, so we hope that Japan will be able to contribute in the accessibility field by playing a central role on the global platform.

The DAISY Consortium has made various contributions, particularly through the United Nations, as an international network. I have listed a lot of UN and NGO organizations on my abstract, and they are all organizations which are carrying out all sorts of activities with global partners established through the DAISY Consortium. To be more precise, organizations which are engaged in global activities in their respective areas have come to realize that accessibility is indispensible in solving problems; whether they are educational issues, agricultural problems, or issues on climate change, information must be made accessible to everyone so that everyone can understand, and only then can you achieve your goals.

So in view of this global development, efforts have been made to move closer to universal design.

Specifically, in the area of education and textbooks, which we are talking about today, we want to provide optimized textbooks and teaching materials. What would be the specifications that are needed for this? We have come to believe that using the asset of accessibility is the most efficient way to achieve this goal.

Therefore, on the whole, we are moving towards universal design, and there will be various areas where DAISY and EPUB's accessibility technologies will be needed. I can say that we are seeing very good case examples as well. Against this backdrop, the need to expand to include new partners has been confirmed at the board meeting of the DAISY Consortium.

Now the current state of accessible textbooks in Japan is not that simple. I wanted to do a demonstration; however, in the interest of time, I will explain the situation specifically. I'm sure some of you have already seen the DAISY textbooks. Japanese textbooks are two-dimensional textbooks containing lots of information. To respond to the needs of students who need to have the text read out, how should all the information in the textbook be read? There must be an order in which the text is read out so that students could understand. However, the fact is that there are a significant amount of textbooks that are difficult for even the editors to determine this order. So the most difficult thing when making a DAISY textbook, or providing text-to-speech, is that at times, there may be an instance where there is no order in which the text could be read out in a comprehensible manner, and in that instance, you would need to omit a portion of the textbook. In the presentation today, we will learn how solutions were sought and implemented in the general classrooms in the Netherlands.

Moreover, there are many technological issues that have not yet been resolved. The DIAGRAM project is leading the initiative to explore solutions on these issues. So we will be hearing two lectures on these topics after this.

Also, the IDPF is currently proposing a new standard which incorporates EPUB accessibility 1.0 into EPUB 3.1. There will be a vote for this soon. When this is approved, what kind of improvements will be made? Of course, if it is not implemented, there will be no use of the standard however good it is. Likewise, even if the contents become better, if there's no player, there would be no meaning. And unless there is a method for distribution, it's not going to work. At the same time, we need to have human resources that will make use of it. So how should we proceed with the development of the overall ecosystem? We will be hearing the experiences and prospects of three countries on this topic from the UK, India, and Norway. They will be telling us briefly about the situations in their countries as well as their comments.

I have high hopes that after listening to the presentations today, we will be able to share a common ground to choose the right path that would lead us to solve further issues going forward.

After the lectures, if you have more things that you would like to know, or if you want to ask questions to specific speakers, we have one additional hour we can spare here, so please make use of this opportunity.

And at the back of the room, we have displayed DAISY textbook players, so I hope you will make use of this significant occasion to take a look at them as well.

With that I would like to close my keynote presentation. Thank you very much.