Wednesday January 11, 2006

"Déjà Vu All Over Again" - Carroll Center for the Blind on ODF in Mass

I'm bummed I hadn't seen this before now! JD at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts has a lengthy and thoughtful blog entry on the accessibility issues and implications of the Massachusetts decision to move to Open Document Format. Titled "Déjà Vu All Over Again", it starts with reminder of what blind folks went through in the DOS-to-Windows conversation. It goes on to make the argument that - access issues temporarily being placed on hold - moving to an open file format is of tremendous value to users generally. Then it enumerates some of the challenges that need to be overcome, and suggests that this whole endeavor is actually probably quite good in the long run for the disability community - by focusing attention on the issue and helping bring a lot more energy to solving accessibility problems.

In addition, JD suggests a very useful "accessibility test": can you write a resume without formatting errors, that you would be proud of and use to get a new job, all while your monitor is turned off? What if you would loose your current job if your resume looked bad? And going beyond that, how usable and productive was that task (JD notes some of the cool features in JAWS versions 6 and 7 that would significantly help with that task). A good suggestion/test for our StarOffice/OpenOffice.org accessibility engineers (perhaps I should tell their boss about it?). (2006-01-11 17:28:14.0) Permalink