Visual Editor for SVG? (Scalable Vector Graphics)

It would be interesting to know whether any companies or researchers, are working on a visual development environment for creating SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) movies, and interactive components. This would be very useful, Flash, Viewlet Builder, and many other tools are good for creating movies and interactive presentations. However there is a need for something that has this ease of use, and produces the same kind of output, using open standard SVG.

This would provide the capability to represent each picture in an alternative way for the blind. Without this functionality, web developers need to manually provide a separate representation for blind people. I doubt that every web developer does this. The SVG output could be the basis of providing a Flash movie, from which information could be extracted automatically. This extracted information would provide the alternative representation for blind people and non-Flash users. Also such a tool would be very good for allowing information to be extracted from the picture, e.g. values and labels from a graph, or attributes from a part diagram.

If the SVG items are grouped in an appropriate way this could make it possible to allow extraction of objects and properties represented in SVG that have a clear meaning. Adobe has acquired http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html, so perhaps they're doing something similar to Flash but with an SVG output? It would be good to see an automatic way of providing the sort of functionality illustrated at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/InteractiveSVGExamples.htm. This is output automatically from a taxonomy represented in Protege, through a Decision support system DecisionPro http://www.vanguardsw.com/.

This sort of thinking ahead by software suppliers would make it much easier for ordinary users to provide good interactive content for the web. This is the basis of 'End User Development', a technique for making it easier for computer literate non-developers to create software. In this case the application of this technique would be enabling the construction of accessible interactive web pages.