Accessibility, DocBook5.2, epub3 transform with xslTNG

[gerard.vidal]

Hi all,
Accessibility of documents particularly in the educational world is a more and more sensitive topic. E-Pub can be a simple and very effective solution to tackle the problem, as its last version has received intense contributions from DAISY consortium. Working with DocBook provides a strong and accessible solution to build e-pubs while keeping DB XML resources in a database.

DocBook5.2 lets incorporate in the xml the

Code: Select all

<meta/>

tags that enable to introduce accessibility informations, at least the Schema.org standard features (or ARIA resources). Docbook 5.2 is pretty stabilized, latest version on github is CR5. It would be a great step towards accessibility to introduce version 5.2 in the list of available versions in oXygen.
At the same time, docbook xslt have evolved towards xslTNG which are of XSLT3 type. The latest version is also pretty stable and could be substituted to the old XSLT used in oXygen. I do not know very well the Java world but N. Walsh provides a getting-started that makes the transformations including DocBook5.2 --> epub3 that may minimize the workload tu introduce them in oXygen. Gradle is used instead of ant (in oXygen) but all structures and configuration files are provided. As Radu said in a previous answer to one of my feature request it is always possible to run the transformation outside of oXygen but we loose all the advantages of oXygen and it is a pain to train our teachers to use something on top of oXygen.
Would it be possible to introduce Docbook 5.2 and xslTNG into oXygen (and take into account the e-pub3.2 recommendations on accessibility for validation)
Thanks for your work and efforts to listen the community.

[Radu]

Hi Gerard,

Thanks for the feature requests.
We have two internal issues:

EXM-51690 Update DocBook schemas to version 5.2
EXM-46081 Evaluate DocBook XSLTNG stylesheets created by Norman Walsh

I added your feedback to both of them.
I will see what I can do to increase their priority, DocBook is not a big improvement direction for us, most of our development is focused on the DITA XML standard. Also DocBook 5.2 is not yet released as a standard and we do not usually ship in Oxygen schemas which are work in progress.
The XSLTNG project seems to have a JAR library which could probably be called from an ANT build file:
https://xsltng.docbook.org/guide/1.11.0 ... #java-main

Regards,
Radu

[gerard.vidal]

Hi Radu,
Thanks for your reply and commitment. I understand the various strategic and economic constraints on oXygen including the fact that Docbook is not the biggest topic in the market, and the lack of official OASIS release.

I don't know for the average user but Docbook remains for us the most efficient tool to build small cross-media resources/books on topics including figures and various multimedia . The progress on accessibility seems to me a crucial step forward in favour of version 5.2. It is hard to convince colleagues and students of the interest of XML writing, and document management, oXygen-DocBook-eXist has been for years efficient and pain-relieving tool to change the habits. I am not a dev and I I cannot help much on the code to bring my point to life .

I have spent some time on DITA with poor success, it is a completely different world that requires some training and anyway seems a bit complicated to be shared with colleagues that are used to export word docs to pdf and drop them as static resources on our LCMS....

I have tried to build a custom-frameworks to host inside oXygen DocBook5.2 and xslTNG ; it works even if my very low competency in Java prevents me from doing proper things . Maybe proposing a DB5custom-frameworks as a plugin (or optional add-on) open to the community may help speed up things if members of the community are interested.
If it has any interest, I can of course share my ugly tries on github or any other git repo or contribute to any initiative. I have detected some anomalies in xslTNG and contributed on docbook/xslTNG on github.
Thanks again for the time and interest spent with us.

[Radu]

Hi Gerard,

Sure, you could try to set up a public GitHub project with your DocBook framework extension. We can try to give you feedback after it's set up.
The JatsKit project is an example of a framework which was started by one of our clients:
https://github.com/wendellpiez/JATSKit
It also contains an Oxygen add-on descriptor file:
https://github.com/wendellpiez/JATSKit/ ... mework.xml
which allows users to install it using Oxygen's "Help->Install new add-on" functionality:
https://github.com/wendellpiez/JATSKit/wiki

Regards,
Radu

[gerard.vidal]

Hi Radu,
Thanks for the guidelines I'll follow and inform you as soon as it set up !
I have another question , as you know I am not a dev and with DocBook5.2 and xslTNG N. Walsh proposes a [getting started package](https://github.com/docbook/getting-started) that takes care of the whole transform as oXygen does with ant scripts. Unfortunately for me the packages relies on `gradle` instead of `ant` to build the epub or xhtml documents.
Is it possible to change ant to gradle within the strategy you recommend, that would ease many things and facilitates the links with DocBook5 hierarchy.
I have not finished to explore xslTNG for epubs, Accessibility ir really tricky !
Thanks again

[Radu]

Hi,

I would suggest that you first try to make the publishing work by running for example Gradle from a command line.
Once you get it working, indeed Oxygen does not have "Gradle" transformation scenarios but from an ANT build file you can use the <exec> task to start a process, for example a Gradle process in this case:

https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/exec.html

Regards,
Radu