The next release of TAMC...

[Chris von See]

Hello, all - 

It's been a while since I've posted anything to this list, so I thought I'd let you know what's going on with TAMC...

I'm in the process of developing the next major release of TAMC, and it will be a pretty significant change from the current release.  Here's a summary of what's changed:

• We've (almost) completely rebuilt TAMC from the ground up, moving away from the current browser-based user interface toward one that looks more like a normal desktop application.  This should make it much easier for us to enhance what's there and to add future functionality, and will hopefully make TAMC much easier to use.
• As part of the move toward a more "desktop" look and feel, the application will become completely accessible when using screen readers that support the Java programming language.  To my knowledge all of the major screen readers do support Java, although I'm not sure about NVDA... if you have a screen reader and are interested in helping test the accessibility and navigability of TAMC, please contact me.
• TAMC now supports the conversion of Microsoft Word documents from Word 2007 and later to any of the supported output formats (currently DAISY, HTML and RTF).  To facilitate the conversion of large textbooks, we've also added the ability to combine multiple MS Word files into a single output - for example, you can now convert individual chapters of a large textbook to MS Word format, clean them up and then combine them together into a single DAISY book.  It's still not possible to combine multiple DAISY or NIMAS file sets during the conversion process - if you think this capability is important, please let us know.

It's our goal to re-start the development of TAMC and to start adding as many new and useful features as we can think of.  The plans for the next release after this one are not set in stone yet, although we're tentatively considering adding the ability to extract text from PDFs (without Acrobat) and to generate MP3 or WAV audio files... If you have ideas as to how we can make TAMC more useful as either a general accessible media conversion tool or as a more integral part of a DSS or distance learning strategy, please let us know!  

Feel free to pass this on to anyone you think may be interested.

Cheers,

Chris von See

Senior Geek

TechAdapt, Inc.

http://www.techadapt.com

ch...@techadapt.com

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