Daniel Weck

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.

Ranging from user-interface design to low-level programming (e.g. audio engineering, XML data processing). In-depth knowledge of software architecture, modularity and extensibility patterns. Proficient with team-oriented development practices, distributed code repositories.

• Strong: .NET C#, Java, C/C++, JavaScript, XSLT (+ other XML processing APIs)
• Comfortable: ObjectiveC, PHP, MySQL
• Beginner: Python (+ quite a few other programming frameworks!)

Master's degree in Information Technology + Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, with Honours. University Joseph Fourier, UFR-IMA (France). Primary academic subjects: human-computer interaction, management of software projects.

• consultancy (2008 - present), DAISY Consortium - Maintained and improved the Urakawa SDK. Enhanced Tobi and added major new features. Participated in the SMIL and CSS W3C working groups. Contributed to the development of the EPUB 3 standard. Joined the Readium Foundation to help implement a reading system framework. Took part in the european eTernity standardisation project (electronic textbooks). Made presentations at major international conferences and book fairs. Conducted training workshops.
• consultancy (2005 - 2007), DFA (DAISY For All) - Designed and developed the self-voicing user interface of AMIS, an open-source playback tool for DAISY talking books. Specified the architecture of the Urakawa SDK, a toolkit for multimedia authoring tools. Conducted the development of Tobi, an open-source production tool for digital talking books.
• consultancy (2004), NRCD (National Rehabilitation for Persons with Disabilities) - Implemented Japanese language support in multimedia production tool, and developed a multilingual captioning system (accessible motion pictures for deaf and hard-of-hearing people).
• 2-year contract (2003 - 2004), INRIA - Designed and implemented a cross-platform multimedia authoring tool. The delivered product became a reference application, and was well-received due to its easy-to-use interface and productivity features.
• 9 months internship (2002), INRIA (French national research institute) - Contributed to the development of a Microsoft PocketPC player for synchronised multimedia. This software project was given the highest grade by the university judges, and the final-year presentation (in English) was awarded.
• 5 months work experience assignment (2001), Schneider-Electric R&D - Developed a web-based trading application that was successfully deployed within the firm's proprietary business tool chain.