[Groff] Semantic tagging and accessibility

[Susan Jolly]

I've been following this discussion with great interest.  I'm involved in
the Braille-in-DAISY project which is looking to enhance DtBook (which is to
some extent a variant of DocBook) with the additional tags necessary to make
possible the first fully automatic transcription to braille. 

I'd like to respond to the question:
>Does an author of the book need to bother with semantic tagging on a
>scale that DocBook _requires_?  Is it a task for a publisher if they
>want it? 

First, the issue of who should do the tagging is probably for an
organization to decide on the basis of cost-effectiveness and not something
we need to dwell on here.  Also, one can certainly imagine inventing tools
to make it easy to add at least some tagging in a final editing step.

Anyway, my point is that semantic tagging of a single source, however done,
is not only going to allow one to produce better HTML and PDF from the same
XML file but is going to have other significant advantages which are not all
necessarily immediately obvious.  As far as my own interests, I already
anticipate a huge decrease in the cost of converting documents to accessible
formats such as large print and braille. 

Here's just one small example where DocBook scale semantic tagging makes a
difference to English braille in a way that might be unexpected to someone
unfamiliar with braille rules.  Braille is to some extent a shorthand and
uses each of the letters to represent a word when the letter stands alone.
For example, the letter _p_ translates the word _people_ and the letter _x_
translates (arbitrarily) the word _it_.  Braille translations thus have to
insert a special braille escape character when a letter stands for itself
rather than for the default word in order to avoid nonsense.  (Using the
braille equivalent of italics or quotes would be ambiguous.)  In this case
tagging the literal or symbolic use of letters with the equivalent of HTML
<var> would avoid the need for heuristics in the braille transcribing
software.

Sincerely,
Susan Jolly