Daniel Weck is a software engineer who works with the DAISY Consortium, a global not-for-profit organisation whose aim is to ensure that persons with print disabilities (e.g. people who are blind, visually-impaired, dyslexic) have equal access to information and knowledge, without delay or additional expense.
For the past decade, Daniel has developed open-source software in the fields of multimedia and electronic publishing ("e-books"), including validation utilities, authoring tools and reading systems. Within the past few years, Daniel has written playback and production software for DAISY/EPUB digital talking books, with a particular focus on accessible user-interfaces.
In early 2013, Daniel joigned the implementation effort conducted by the Readium Foundation, where he acts as lead developer, with a strong focus in the accessibility domain. Alongside mainstream stakeholders, Daniel has been coordinating the cross-platform implementation of EPUB3 Media Overlays (read aloud e-books), and is also working on support for synthetic speech / TTS, image descriptions / annotations, and assistive technologies (screen readers, etc.).
Daniel has also been involved in advocacy and support activities. This includes international conferences (e.g. London / Frankfurt / Paris Book Fairs), as well as specialist training workshops.
Daniel has been an active contributor in several open-standard working groups, including IDPF EPUB 3, W3C "aural" CSS (speech-oriented style sheets for the web), and SMIL (XML-based media synchronisation language at the heart of talking books).
Through his various activities, Daniel aims to deliver commercial-grade applications and tools, to help create a more inclusive publishing ecosystem.
Daniel is a native French speaker, but lives permanently in the United Kingdom and speaks English fluently.