Proposal to create create a Community Group Report for the switching of horizontal and vertical writing

[murata2makoto]

On behalf of the Technical Committee of the Japanese DAISY Consortium, I propose to create a Community Group Report for the switching of horizontal and vertical writing.

The technical content of this proposed CG report is almost identical to a member submission of alternate styles tags specification. It has been implemented by Japanese DAISY readers and used by Japanese DAISY users.

In Japan, some persons with print disabilities find either horizontal or vertical writing particularly difficult. Dyslexic persons often have problems with vertical writing. Meanwhile, persons with autism or optic stenosis often have problems with horizontal writing. An experiment (see Section 3 of this document) conducted by KOUYAMA Tadashi reveals that dyslexic people tend to have more problems with vertical writing. More information (in Japanese) about his experiment is available here.

Use case: A publisher creates an EPUB publication having vertical-writing stylesheets and alternate horizontal-writing CSS stylesheets. By default, vertical writing is used. But some dyslexic users switch to horizontal writing.

Expected attendees: members of the technical committee of the Japanese DAISY Consortium.

[murata2makoto]

In a private email, Avneesh wrote:

We would like to propose a short term task force for now (4 to 6 months). The timeline for next three months is as follows, which will be adjusted as we move ahead.

• Kick-off: 2021 January
• First draft and motivating examples: 2021 February
• CG Note: 2021 March / April.

[ghost]

Thanks @murata2makoto fro bring this up. We will talk about this in today's meeting.