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Tobi v1.7: accessible infographics, DIAGRAM image descriptions
2012-05-01 09:48

Dear blog readers,

Tobi v1.7 is the first application to support the full DIAGRAM content model for image descriptions. The new dedicated editor provides a powerful, yet easy-to-use user-interface to enter textual descriptions, to specify alternative images, and to author rich metadata. Tobi also extends DIAGRAM capabilities by enabling audio narration, via the same waveform editing tools that are available to produce DAISY 3 digital talking books.

With the advent of the DIAGRAM standard, this will be an exiting year in the field of accessible infographics, which are critical in educational publishing (STEM, etc.). We are looking forward to releasing EPUB 3 support, later this year. This will not only provide EPUB 3 Media Overlays capabilities (the equivalent of DAISY 3 books with synchronised human narration, but built directly into the mainstream EPUB industry standard), this will also be a testbed for inclusion of image descriptions straight inside publications. Note that Tobi also exports image descriptions to the standalone DIAGRAM XML format, so future reading systems / book players will be able to render descriptive data from various sources.

The DAISY-Planet newsletter has a great article about this release. There is also a recent news announcement.

Part one of a video tutorial is available on Youtube, with captions. We also maintain a Youtube playlist of all the Tobi-related videos, so let us know if you produce instructional material that you would like to share!

Documentation-wise, this short guide should get you started. There is also a more complete manual.

As always, you can have a look at the change log to track the releases (note that your Tobi installation will update automatically if you installed the official ClickOnce version, but not if you run Tobi from the alternative ZIP archive).

Many thanks for your support!
Kind regards, Daniel

Screenshots:

Editor in "basic" mode, showing sample textual descriptions (Long description, Summary and Simplified Language). Note how only the long description currently has an audio narration recorded for it:

Editor in "basic" mode, showing sample alternative images (Simplified Image and Tactile Image), with associated "tour" textual descriptions. Note that the images are a bit random, but this is for illustration purposes only. For example, the tiger is the iconic SVG picture, which showcases Tobi's support for scalable vector graphics:

Editor in "advanced" mode, showing dc:title and dc:date metadata, also with dc:creator and its associated xml:id (useful in a rich metadata set, for referencing from other items):

Audio recording tool and waveform editor, which is a popup dialog spawned from the image description editor in "advanced" mode. Note the text "this is a long description", which indicates the item that is currently being recorded:

Tobi v1.6, much faster audio waveform editor

2011-12-23 15:01
Just in time for Christmas: Tobi now ships with a brand new waveform renderer, which displays audio pretty fast (dare I say, near-instantaneously) and incrementally loads large audio assets (i.e. dynamically, as the horizontal pane scrolls). This is a major upgrade which ; according to our internal testing ; should really improve the user experience during authoring workflows where long audio recordings are used. The recently-introduced "split and shift" audio synchronization feature definitely benefits from the faster waveform loading. You can try by turning on "autoplay", then start playback, then incrementally hit CTRL-RETURN to split a large audio recording into smaller pieces that immediately align with the text structure. As usual, please take a look at the more detailed change log. Best end-of-year wishes to you all! Kind regards, Daniel

Tobi 1.5.2: no more keyboard focus stealing!
2011-12-15 04:19
Important update for keyboard users: some Tobi commands were being hijacked by the document renderer (typically, when selecting / clicking text with the mouse, but also when tab-navigating into the document, because of notes/annotations references). This is now finally fixed, and the overall user experience is a lot more satisfying. Because it is Christmas soon, we also took the opportunity to implement new handy audio configuration dialogs that popup just when you need them, i.e. when creating a new project and at export time. Going into the main application preferences was cumbersome, this is now much simpler. As usual, take a look at the change log when you update Tobi. All the best, Dan Reminder: let us know what you think about the new video tutorial!

Tobi v1.5.1, bug fixes + new audio feature!
2011-12-14 10:09
Tobi version 1.5.1 is out! As usual, check out the change log to see what's new. The bugs squashed in this release really improve the user experience, so we thoroughly recommend upgrading. I am particularly exited about the new "split and shift" audio feature, which greatly increases productivity. This keyboard-driven functionality (CTRL-RETURN) enables a much smoother workflow when working with a text-only transcript and pre-existing audio assets (reminder: use CTRL-I to insert MP3 or WAV files). The text/audio synchronization consists in a simple, intuitive sequence of repetitive actions, especially when using the "auto play" mode (tip: use SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-SPACE to toggle the mode). I found that speeding-up the audio playback (CTRL-UP) makes the process faster with no loss in accuracy. The undo/redo (CTRL-Z / Y) comes handy when making a mistake or when missing a synchronization point, but because undoing actually highlights / selects the affected audio, don't forget to deselect (CTRL-D) or select-all (CTRL-A) in order to reset the playback cursor (use the HOME key to listen from the beginning). The previous/next text navigation shortcuts (CTRL-COMMA / COLON) make it trivial to verify the state of the synchronization at any given time. Remember, you can hit the ESCAPE key to interrupt the waveform rendering/loading for long audio files (most operations can be performed without the need to display the entire audio). The ESCAPE key turns "auto play" off, so if you need it turned on again you can use the SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-SPACE keyboard shortcut or tick the box in the icon toolbar. We intend to publish a short instructional video for this new feature, hopefully very soon. In the meantime, let us know what you think on the forum! Kind regards, Daniel - UPDATE- A short video tutorial is now available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQaVXdgKSn0

Tobi v1.5, image descriptions
2011-11-02 01:26

Tobi version 1.5 brings numerous improvements and bug fixes (as described in the change log), and ships with a robust editor for image descriptions that conform to the DIAGRAM format.

This is an intermediate release in the sense that the image description standard is still being finalised, but also because within the next few months, Tobi will enable audio narrations of the image annotations themselves (in addition to the main "book" content). The DIAGRAM format supports multiple image descriptions in order to cater for various needs (e.g. tactile picture, simple versus long text descriptions, alternative illustrations, tour/overview), and Tobi will eventually enable audio descriptions (i.e. voice recording) across the board.

This, in addition to the upcoming support for EPUB3 Media Overlays (DAISY-like text/audio synchronisation for e-books), means that 2012 will be an exciting year!

This short guide is provided to get started with image descriptions in Tobi. We also recommend this small DAISY 3 DTBOOK ("Great Painters", 600KB) as a starting point to experiment with the new editing features.

For further information about the image descriptions data model, please visit the DIAGRAM Center website.

Finally, here are a couple of screenshots showing the new user interface used to navigate images in the book content:

Tobi v1.4.0.1
2011-04-03 18:43

The main focus for this update is performance improvements. Thanks to the joint work between the Obi and Tobi projects, the common underlying Urakawa SDK library has been dramatically enhanced, and now enables much faster opening and saving of large project files. In addition, the responsiveness of the document pane in the Tobi user-interface has been greatly improved thanks to optimizations in the audio recording workflow. This results in an overall smoother recording experience, with less lag and potential delays on slower machines.

Last but not least, Tobi can now import Obi projects ("*.obi" files). This feature is based on a complex XSLT2 XML transformation, so the (free) [Saxon.NET "home edition" libraries](http://saxon.sourceforge.net) must be installed separately. This new feature means that already-existing audio-only content can be "upgraded" to full-text full-audio projects. Tobi currently only offers basic text editing (no structural modifications of the document are possible), but this is sufficient to author the text labels associated with audio phrases originally recorded from within Obi.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback !
Regards, Daniel

Tobi roadmap update
2011-03-01 05:55

Main stream publishing standards are being defined by ongoing DAISY-EPUB revision for facilitating accessible publishing in main stream, encouraging alignment of Tobi’s development path according to this transition.

The plan of development cycle is to implement the EPUB multimedia (EPUB 3) authoring work flows in Tobi, evolving it into an EPUB authoring tool. As an EPUB authoring tool, Tobi intends to cater to needs of broader audience and will be able to perform an important role of facilitating transition of DAISY membership to new EPUB 3 standards.

Along with providing support for new EPUB 3 standards, the development team will be working on implementing new features in Tobi, one of the most important being implementation of image description workflow in partnership with the DIAGRAM project. This will enable Tobi to author accessible graphics and provide access to diagrams, images and graphs to print-disabled.

Tobi team will like to hear comments, requests, feedback from existing and potential users of Tobi, in order to understand the real life expectations from the tool. We may not be able to satisfy your requests immediately but active feedback will help us define the development path of the project in long run.

Thanking all of you for your active support.
Avneesh Singh (on behalf of Tobi team)
asingh[@]daisy.org

Tobi application updates, version numbers, change-log
2010-06-05 12:30

Since Tobi v1.0 was released (only a couple of weeks ago), we published a number of application updates to fix minor bugs and to improve existing features. During this process, the Tobi forum has been the main communication channel between end-users and developers / support staff. In some cases, we even added new functionality to answer urgent needs. Normally, we would register feature requests into the project tracker for version 2.0 (i.e. "future directions"), but sometimes the well-defined scope and relatively low implementation costs justify an immediate response. - By the way, many thanks to users who are actively putting Tobi in trial mode within their respective organizations, we will continue to address your queries in a timely manner. -

It comes as no surprise that not-so-minor changes are still being made to the application, because of the low community participation in the Alpha, Beta and even Release Candidate phases of the project. Now that Tobi is gaining momentum, the feedback is flowing-in and we sometimes fix major issues that we didn't catch earlier, during our internal testing (typically, problems with computer-specific audio drivers, system-dependent errors, etc.).

Thanks to Tobi's deployment method (based on Microsoft's ClickOnce technology), we are able to "push" application updates directly to an existing end-user installation, and the payload is usually lower than 1MB (out of the 9MB full application download). Should you have decided to skip an available update (when prompted at Tobi's startup), ClickOnce will stop notifying you for an entire week. The only way to update Tobi during this period is to visit the "download" page and click on the appropriate link in the "Install and launch" section (this forces your local Tobi installation to update itself). Please note that this "limitation" is outside of our control.

Recently, we published application updates quite frequently, so we encourage you to take a look at the Tobi change-log to see what is going on. In future versions of Tobi, the ClickOnce dialog prompt will offer a direct link to the "change-log" page, or even better, it will display the description text corresponding to the update. In the meantime, please keep a bookmark of the Tobi website.

Last but not least, some of you may have been wondering about the logic behind version numbers. At the time of writing, Tobi has reached v1.3, which seems a little high given how fresh v1.0 still is ! Well, this is actually a technical mishap in our build script ... from now on we will stop incrementing the second digit for a while unless duly justified by a major feature update. Although this shouldn't create any problems per say, we apologize for the confusion it may cause.

Kind regards, Daniel

Tobi and DAISY 2.02 full text, full audio
2010-05-31 06:20

Although the current version of Tobi is primarily a DAISY 3 production tool, we aim to provide support for legacy reading systems that still depend on the DAISY 2.02 format. The recommended workflow is to run the DAISY Pipeline "DAISY 3 to DAISY 2.02" script against the fileset exported by Tobi. We recently wrote a short blog post on that subject.

It is worth noting that this Pipeline script is still in beta, so it is fair to expect some shortcomings. One known limitation listed in the "Input Requirements" section of the script documentation (i.e. "The first par of each zed smil file must be a heading") happens to be problematic in some cases when the initial DTBook XML is generated by the "Save As DAISY" addin for Microsoft Word (this production scenario has not been checked with the Open Office addin yet).

When the DTBook contains multiple docTitles ; typically, inside arbitrary levels of the XML document (which is valid as per the 2005-3 DTD ) ; the conversion to DAISY 2.02 fails. This has been discussed on the Tobi forum already. An easy workaround consists in manually replacing the docTitles inside the DTBook levels with appropriate headings (e.g. h1). Alternatively, it seems that the DTBook "fixer" Pipeline script could help, as it is successfully used internally by the Save As DAISY addins when producing full-text full-audio books.

We are currently evaluating ways to support these various edge cases. In the meantime, please let us know (via the forum) how you are getting on with DAISY 2.02 full-text full-audio production using Tobi. Many thanks for your feedback! Regards, Daniel

DAISY Pipeline update offers better support for Tobi
2010-05-27 14:04

Dear Tobi users, the latest patch for the DAISY Pipeline includes fixes in the DAISY 3 to DAISY 2.02 "downgrader", and as a result it is strongly recommended to upgrade if you intend to produce publications that target legacy reading devices with no support for DAISY 3. Please take a look at this post on the Pipeline project blog:

http://www.daisy.org/pipeline/blog/daisy-pipeline-gui-update-patch-20100527

Regards, Daniel

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