Thursday November 17, 2005

KDE's KOffice 1.4.1 accessibility assessment posted

Gary Cramblitt, KDE accessibility guy and maintainer of KTTS the KDE text-to-speech system, has posted his accessibility assessment of the KDE Office suite KOffice version 1.4.1. [Note that KOffice is one of the applications that supports the OASIS Open Document Format] The accessibility review is available for download in StarOffice Writer format, in Open Document format, and in PDF format.

Quick summary: a fair amount works in theme support for mild visual impairments, there are quite a few keyboard navigation problems - epsecially for more advanced features, and today it isn't at all usable by the blind.

This may sound odd, but I believe that this report is really a good thing! It shows the KDE community doing an honest self-assessment and turning up problems. Because you can't fix problems you don't know about, and you can't know about problems if you don't look for 'em. And if you actually read through the report, you'll see that a bunch of specific problems are already slated to be fixed in KOffice 1.5 which "is scheduled for release in early 2006." By shining a bright light on the problems with this assessment, Gary clearly hopes that still more issues will be fixed in version 1.5, or soon thereafter. And now that folks in the disability community have stated that they would support ODF if it were accessible, the onus is on developers of ODF applications to do the work to make that happen. (2005-11-17 18:12:59.0) Permalink

Rich's/Orca's first "blind" e-mail

My team-mate Rich Burridge is one of the developers of Orca, an open source, scripting screen reader for UNIX systems. In his blog of today, he talks about his work on Orca, and reaching the point where he turned off his monitor and wrote his first e-mail "blind" using Orca.

For developers interested in ensuring their software is accessible, going "blind" or "without hands", or otherwise using your software for a while as someone with a disability would use it - through an assistive technology - is absolutely critical. While this isn't a substitute for users with disabilities testing and using the software themselves (and telling you what you need to fix), it makes a huge difference, especially when done early in the development process when it is easiest to fix accessibility problems.

Oh, and Rich's story is a good read too! (2005-11-17 17:40:42.0) Permalink