On November 5, TV3 became the first DAM application in the world to support the new IPTC Alternative Text and Extended Description metadata fields. These fields are designed to assist visually impaired people understand and navigate websites and other electronic documents. Creating a standardized way to attach this information to images allows easier workflow and should greatly improve compliance.
TV3’s highly flexible architecture allows us to incorporate changes like this in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months like many other DAMs. We’re now looking for publishing platforms who also want to be on the leading edge by supporting these new fields.
Press release here.
New Event Identifiers
In addition to the new accessibility fields, the IPTC organization also announced a new field for event identification. Until now, the Event Shown field was just a string of text, with no specific meaning attached. You can now pinpoint an event by attaching an Event Identifier: URLs or other identifiers that help define a specific event – Jazzfest 2012, Thomas and Marissa’s wedding, or any other event where a unique identifier exists.
This new field was inspired by TV3. In a demonstration this summer to the co-lead of the IPTC metadata working group, we demonstrated our ability to add lots of data to an event. This includes identifiers, date ranges, location data, affiliated organizations, people, and other keywords. A few months later, the idea has now become an international standard.
A big part of my personal objective in TV3 is to lead by example. By building cool and useful capabilities into our app, we can help to move the ball forward for everyone. It’s a real joy to see this hitting the streets in such a short time frame.
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