Aequus Digital Publishing Solutions,
a division of Aequus Technologies, Corp., offers three unique product
and service categories that together combine to create student-ready
fully accessible digital instructional materials. Although these
technologies were initially designed for accessibility for students
with disabilities, they have broad usefulness for improving the
learning experiences and outcomes for all students, and are especially
effective at addressing the struggling student marketplace.
At the core are patented technologies, which work
together to create highly functional instructional materials: SWAP™
(Semantic Web Accessibility Platform), SWAP-ML™ semantic markup,
and a publisher-customized version of AspireREADER™.
SWAP™ automatically converts PDF, QuarkXPress,
or Adobe InDesign files into consistently and intelligently tagged
SWAP-ML™ files. These can then either be rendered by AspireREADER™,
or converted into other forms of XML, (at its simplest, NIMAS, or
to more complex publisher-defined DTDs.) This is achieved by a combination
of intelligent data-interpretation tools that learn about publisher
content, then apply this learning to entire books or series of books
that have consistent formatting and pedagogical layout. As these
tools learn, as more and more content is run through, the process
becomes more highly automated and efficient, while creating mark-up
of high quality and consistency, eliminating the errors and variability
inherent in manual offshore tagging.
SWAP-ML™ combines structural markup (such
as found in NIMAS, for example) with semantic markup that defines
what is contained in the actual content (for example, which state
standard or learning objective it meets,) with tags that optimize
final delivery of the content in AspireREADER™.
The AspireREADER™ is then customized to meet
specific publisher requirements, such as defining reading order,
or how to jump between content chunks for maximum instructional
value, so that the user/reader achieves the intended learning experience.
It also preserves the layout of the printed book. Naturally, it
has all the capabilities you would expect in a "digital talking
book" but with more extensibility for adding specific custom
functionality than any e-book delivery platform. It is also extraordinarily
simple to use, designed to allow simple user controls through either
the keyboard or mouse.
These capabilities join together to deliver a true
universally designed learning experience, the "Hotbook,"
which can be re-branded according to each publisher’s requirements.
|
|
