The Urakawa Project

Urakawa is a software project which aims at providing a multimedia authoring toolkit for designing content that is fully accessible to persons with disabilities. There are 2 main software deliverables: a SDK ("Software Development Toolkit") and Obi (a prototype application to demonstrate the SDK features). At this early stage, the objective is to deliver a software framework for easy development of quality production tools for Digital Talking Books (e.g. Daisy).

The Urakawa SDK (Software Development Kit) is a software framework which can be used to easily build complex multimedia authoring applications. It is modular and can be extended to meet specific application domain requirements.

Potential use-cases include structured video authoring, captioning/subtitling, DVD/interactive TV design, but for now the priority is given to supporting Digital Talking Books in Daisy format. The Daisy Digital Talking Books format is a well-established NISO standard with rich content available world-wide. Daisy partially relies on SMIL, the multimedia standard maintained by the W3C. The Urakawa software project integrates these technologies and is extensible to other formats.

Obi is a prototype application written in C#.NET and compiled as an easy-to-install Windows application. The application's feature set is intentionally limited (Daisy 3 audio-only books, with audio recording and table of content authoring). The primary objective is to demonstrate the Urakawa toolkit, not to provide a full-fledge production tool.

The Urakawa project is backed-up by major international organizations that strive in promoting open standards (as in "non-proprietary") and open-source development efforts. By working without the usual burden of a profit-driven agenda, our aim is to encourage the development of quality multimedia production tools by third-party developers or organizations.

The Daisy Consortium is the initiator of the project. In addition, the project is actively supported by the following organizations: the INRIA from France, the CWI from Netherlands, and the NRCD from Japan. For more details, check the sponsors section.

Software releases of the Urakawa project (binaries and source code) are distributed free-of-charge, royalty-free, under a liberal open-source license that allows unrestricted commercial exploitation.

Urakawa is the name of a town in Japan, on the Hokkaido island. The very first official project meeting took place in Urakawa-town, where the role of multimedia was heavily discussed, in particular in the fields of disaster preparedness and accessibility for people with disabilities. The Urakawa logo is a reminder of this event.

Both the SDK and Obi software components are released under an open-source license, so the source code can be downloaded and modified without restrictions. Please contact the Urakawa team if you wish to obtain developer-access (read-write) to the SVN ("Subversion") repository.