This note provides some quick background links relevant to proposed orientation of working group towards accessibility and annotations.
Proposed orientation is to support production by anybody of secure, authenticated, accessible annotations of all forms of information and dissemination of such annotations in a way that is accessible to people regardless of disabilities and requirements for privacy or anonymity and resilient against attempts at disruption or surveillance.
See Westminster Declaration for relevance of requirements for privacy and anonymity and resiliance against attempts at disruption and surveillance.
The highlighting of annotations is intended as a specific focus for this working group to complement work being done elsewhere. Annotation is of course central to all forms of scientific contestation of ideas that censorship seeks to block. It is how people start making their own contributions to developing from "common sense" to scientific reasoning about both the natural world and human society.
See for example this description of Note-taking and research methods used by people actually trying to understand the world, past and present
Section 6 on pp6-9 (pdf 10-11 of 27) describes the methods of a well known 19th century writer central to publishing in both Scientific Philosophy and Scientific Economics.
In this millenium it is of course no longer necessary to copy out extracts by hand, though writing one's own synopsis of what others have said before responding to it is still useful. Annotations are the starting point for such work.
It is now possible to make such annotations directly accessible to whoever else is now, or might later become, interested in them using well standardized technology to Publish and Subscribe via hybrid topic and content based filtering networks that greatly exceed the capabilities of mass media publishing enterprises.
The specific focus on annotations enables starting production of annotations for exchange within the working group by export and import of subcollections using Zotero.
But it also aimed at supporting technical development (by others) of an eventual capability for accessably producing and securely disseminating "Companion Editions" of any (published or unpublished) work and likewise for collecting, editing and disseminating materials that are part of a new mass media produced to and from the general public, that is less reliant on government and corporate organization.
Much the same development is useful for encouraging "parallel" editions. In many areas a neutral "Encyclopedia" account of a topic actually requires treatment from multiple competing perspectives, which should be easily accessible to contrast with each other. Historical "facts" are far from neutral
The technical work will need to strictly follow existing best practices and standards that enable accessible cataloging and discovery services. Wikimedia provides good examples of doing so and has an extensive Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development supporting use by some 30 million editors with 300,000 contributing and and 1.7 billion people accessing each month :
Much of what we need to do can be done by simply participating in that much larger project. The rest should be complementary to it and making use of FOSS technology develped by it and in projects found among those from 100 million people active on Github (plus others).
Some historical background is provided in:
A 1945 essay describing the future based on the technology available then:
As well as the content, note the numerous features of the page that link it to other information that is highlighted by "hovering" a mouse over an underlined link. That is an example of "annotations", but is only working within the (voluminous) output of a single publisher (wikimedia). The page itself is an illustration of how that future is unfolding now, nearly 80 years later.
From 40 years later and nearly 40 years ago, this 1985 article from Australian Disability Review (still not available online elsewhere).
See especially the sections headed Computerised libraries and Who Pays for Publishing from pp31-33 (pdf 5-6 of 6).
The preceding pages 28-30 describe the technology already available then, as described in the referenced book available (with access restrictions) here:
The widely used JAWS screen reader for Text To Speech (TTS) was not developed until a decade later and is no longer essential since free TTS software is readily available for use with any properly published accessible ebook. But significantly enhanced versions are now available:
They include features that are relevant to both tightly restricted institutional access and the standards now in place for workplaces to use accessible Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems:
Properly setup, any user with Zotero or similar software enhanced for accessibility should be able to do the following:
On encountering any sort of excerpt or citation of material within a work or an annotation of that work, immediately obtain full access to the referenced excerpt or annotation in the context of the whole work, because the software transparently uses the catalog systems and archives already in place. Future technology may just involve thinking about wanting it. Current technology for "hovering" with a mouse over a link can already be used with different Human Interface Devices for people with various disabilities.
On wishing to add or edit an annotation. Simply start writing or dictating the annotation or the alterations to it.
Short term results should include more accessible works with less accessability problems.
Long term results should include accelerated transition to both the freely accessible and global library described there, and a very different mass media and social media from what is currently provided by governments and corporations.
Fully unleashing the technology already matured and embodded in formal standards also requires a necessary complement, an alternative to copyright as the mechanism for funding publication - a change in the social relations of production corresponding to the existing productive forces.
There may be a need for more than one formal registered non-profit organization working on this project, and cooperating with each other, not including most of the actual technical work done by other FOSS projects. eg:
An educational instititution with principal functions of of providing assistance to persons who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled for both producing and consuming access to published works and assisting with importation and exportation of material permitted by the Marrakesh Treaty because all or part of that material in an accessible format is not otherwise available within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price.
A Research and Education Institution with principal functions of research, education and training for developing and using the tools needed for direct production of the contents of a fully and easily annotatable and accesssible global library by the global users of that library and policy development for funding publishing.
Publishers for accessible material in different areas and in various forms, that are compatible with linking annotations directly between copies stored on the same device and automatically retrieving such copies when users follow links in copies they already have.
An example of a specific publisher with a specialized political and philosophical area that is already using partially accessible searchable formats is here:
Simply having at least added proper searchable OCR to the scanned versions of printed works means that such works could easily be upgraded for properly linked Table of Contents, footnotes, citations and index and with internal anchors at page and paragraph to which external annotations can directly link from other publications - not necessarily from the same publisher.
It will sometimes be necessary to do more intensive work on scanning and OCR correction as well as on translation. But if we practice upgrading some works that already have good quality searchable text it should be possible to make that a semi-automatic process that anybody can do easily, including people with disabilities.
That publisher has a large print series, with a link to the Large Print Guidelines produced by the American Publishing House for the Blind. Those guidelines also point towards a suitable FOSS Inter font family that can be used to enhance any work.
This note provides some quick background links relevant to proposed orientation of working group towards accessibility and annotations.
Proposed orientation is to support production by anybody of secure, authenticated, accessible annotations of all forms of information and dissemination of such annotations in a way that is accessible to people regardless of disabilities and requirements for privacy or anonymity and resilient against attempts at disruption or surveillance.
See Westminster Declaration for relevance of requirements for privacy and anonymity and resiliance against attempts at disruption and surveillance.
The highlighting of annotations is intended as a specific focus for this working group to complement work being done elsewhere. Annotation is of course central to all forms of scientific contestation of ideas that censorship seeks to block. It is how people start making their own contributions to developing from "common sense" to scientific reasoning about both the natural world and human society.
See for example this description of Note-taking and research methods used by people actually trying to understand the world, past and present
Section 6 on pp6-9 (pdf 10-11 of 27) describes the methods of a well known 19th century writer central to publishing in both Scientific Philosophy and Scientific Economics.
In this millenium it is of course no longer necessary to copy out extracts by hand, though writing one's own synopsis of what others have said before responding to it is still useful. Annotations are the starting point for such work.
It is now possible to make such annotations directly accessible to whoever else is now, or might later become, interested in them using well standardized technology to Publish and Subscribe via hybrid topic and content based filtering networks that greatly exceed the capabilities of mass media publishing enterprises.
The specific focus on annotations enables starting production of annotations for exchange within the working group by export and import of subcollections using Zotero.
But it also aimed at supporting technical development (by others) of an eventual capability for accessably producing and securely disseminating "Companion Editions" of any (published or unpublished) work and likewise for collecting, editing and disseminating materials that are part of a new mass media produced to and from the general public, that is less reliant on government and corporate organization.
Much the same development is useful for encouraging "parallel" editions. In many areas a neutral "Encyclopedia" account of a topic actually requires treatment from multiple competing perspectives, which should be easily accessible to contrast with each other. Historical "facts" are far from neutral
The technical work will need to strictly follow existing best practices and standards that enable accessible cataloging and discovery services. Wikimedia provides good examples of doing so and has an extensive Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development supporting use by some 30 million editors with 300,000 contributing and and 1.7 billion people accessing each month :
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Much of what we need to do can be done by simply participating in that much larger project. The rest should be complementary to it and making use of FOSS technology develped by it and in projects found among those from 100 million people active on Github (plus others).
Some historical background is provided in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
As well as the content, note the numerous features of the page that link it to other information that is highlighted by "hovering" a mouse over an underlined link. That is an example of "annotations", but is only working within the (voluminous) output of a single publisher (wikimedia). The page itself is an illustration of how that future is unfolding now, nearly 80 years later.
AusDisabilityReview1985V2N4pp28-33.pdf
See especially the sections headed Computerised libraries and Who Pays for Publishing from pp31-33 (pdf 5-6 of 6).
The preceding pages 28-30 describe the technology already available then, as described in the referenced book available (with access restrictions) here:
https://archive.org/details/zdanh_test_031_personalcomputer00mcwi
The same out of print book is freely available here (without access restrictions and faster):
Full catalog record at LCCN 84010309
The widely used JAWS screen reader for Text To Speech (TTS) was not developed until a decade later and is no longer essential since free TTS software is readily available for use with any properly published accessible ebook. But significantly enhanced versions are now available:
They include features that are relevant to both tightly restricted institutional access and the standards now in place for workplaces to use accessible Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems:
https://www.access-board.gov/ict/
Properly setup, any user with Zotero or similar software enhanced for accessibility should be able to do the following:
Short term results should include more accessible works with less accessability problems.
Long term results should include accelerated transition to both the freely accessible and global library described there, and a very different mass media and social media from what is currently provided by governments and corporations.
Fully unleashing the technology already matured and embodded in formal standards also requires a necessary complement, an alternative to copyright as the mechanism for funding publication - a change in the social relations of production corresponding to the existing productive forces.
There may be a need for more than one formal registered non-profit organization working on this project, and cooperating with each other, not including most of the actual technical work done by other FOSS projects. eg:
An example of a specific publisher with a specialized political and philosophical area that is already using partially accessible searchable formats is here:
https://foreignlanguages.press/foundations/
Simply having at least added proper searchable OCR to the scanned versions of printed works means that such works could easily be upgraded for properly linked Table of Contents, footnotes, citations and index and with internal anchors at page and paragraph to which external annotations can directly link from other publications - not necessarily from the same publisher.
It will sometimes be necessary to do more intensive work on scanning and OCR correction as well as on translation. But if we practice upgrading some works that already have good quality searchable text it should be possible to make that a semi-automatic process that anybody can do easily, including people with disabilities.
That publisher has a large print series, with a link to the Large Print Guidelines produced by the American Publishing House for the Blind. Those guidelines also point towards a suitable FOSS Inter font family that can be used to enhance any work.
Feedback please?
Can we assume this general orientation?