Wednesday May 31, 2006

Open Source Accessibility usability study

The KDE Accessibility project had been working on a variety of aspects of desktop accessibility as part of the KDE desktop (the other main graphical UNIX and GNU/Linux desktop, other than the GNOME desktop). Their work includes defining the keyboard sequences for desktop operation, themes for use by folks with vision impairments, and also the development of some assistive technologies. They are also working to implement support for the AT-SPI (the accessibility programming framework that came out of the GNOME Accessibility Project).

The KDE Accessibility folks recently teamed up with linaccess to do a usability study of open source accessibility solutions. Their study involved 5 members of the linaccess team - three partially sighted individuals and two blind individuals - with varying UNIX and Windows experience. The main 47 page report covers mostly the KDE desktop accessibility features and accessibility theme support, but also includes some Gnopernicus tasks. They also produced a screen magnification report that evaluated the software screen magnifier that is being developed by the KDE Accessibility project.

This usability work is the first of its kind to my knowledge looking at the usability successes and challenges of graphical UNIX desktops for folks with vision impairments. The KDE Project and linaccess have done a great service to everyone working on open source and UNIX accessibility. To excerpt a bit from their summary description of this work:

Another way I might summarize the situation is that, while a lot of the basic tools for success are coming together, their remains work to do in (a) many of the applications on the graphical desktop; and (b) in the UNIX and GNU/Linux distributions, many of which add their own installation/packaging applications which haven't been sufficiently developed and tested for accessibility. In other words, not all UNIX and GNU/Linux distributions are the same when it comes to accessibility - the apps they put together and test play a huge role in the user experience.

I'd also like to comment on a few specific things brought up the report. One problem noted was the inaccessibility of the default GNOME Evince PDF reader. While not an open source application, Adobe makes their Adobe Reader application available as a free binary download for GNU/Linux and Solaris, and it works well with Gnopernicus and also has features for reading documents aloud directly (without the need for a screen reader). Another problem noted was the hassle of installing the Sun Java Runtime with Java Accessibility support in order to gain screen reader access to OpenOffice.org. This dependency is going away in OpenOffice.org version 2.0.3, and nightly builds of 2.0.3 are already available with this functionality present. Finally, the study noted that it was cumbersome to use a chat program GAIM with Gnopernicus. While still relatively new, the open source Orca screen reader is designed around the idea of application-specific customization to improve the blind and low-vision user experience, efficiency, and productivity. One of the first Orca scripts was for GAIM, and our blind Orca designer Mike Pedersen uses Orca with GAIM all the time (see the Orca blog entry about this).

Again, I think this underscores an earlier observation: it takes some care and thought to put together an accessible UNIX desktop. We aren't yet at the place where all UNIX graphical desktops are completely accessible out of the box. (2006-05-31 17:03:08.0) Permalink

Friday May 26, 2006

OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee recommendations

Begun at the start of this year, the OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee has just completed its first assigned task: an accessibility evaluation of the ~700 page ODF 1.0 specification. Producing this evaluation was the formal statement of purpose of this subcommittee:

The Subcommittee completed the report during a two-day meeting hosted by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, at the RNIB Employment and Learning Centre in Edinburgh. Their transmittal of this report to the Technical Committee, along with all electronic correspondence in the OASIS ODF TC, is public and can be found here (making the OASIS ODF effort an exemplar of transparency and openness). You can find the complete report here in ODF format, and in PDF format, and in XML format.

Here is the Executive Summary of their evaluation:

The fact that this evaluation only turned up 9 accessibility issues out of such a large specification says a lot about how much was already right in the file format itself. The fact that in such a short time accessibility was able to join an open standards process as an invited guest, and make these contributions says a lot about the kinds of benefits to accessibility we can realize from a truly open standards process like we have in OASIS ODF. And I'm delighted to say that this subcommittee plans to continue working on ODF - to start tackling problems that have never been solved in office suite accessibility, including: effective blind access to slide presentations; partnering with the W3C to tackle SVG graphics accessibility; better access to graphs and charts; and improved navigation models for tabular data.

It is important to note that this is all work on the file format. Separate from this is the issue of how well the various assistive technology applications (on the various operating systems) work with and support the various ODF applications. Work on that is happening in parallel to this work on the file format. There will be more to report on that in the coming months... (2006-05-26 21:56:43.0) Permalink

Wednesday May 03, 2006

Some recent developments in ODF Accessibility

Since the ODF Accessibility presentation at CSUN last March, there have been a few notable developments worth sharing.

First, the OASIS ODF Accessibility subcommittee is nearing completion of their Open Document file format accessibility audit. The subcommittee membership includes Sun Microsystems and IBM, the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Bay State Council of the Blind, Design Science and the OpenDocument Foundation, and several unaffiliated individuals with deep expertise in accessibility (and about one third of the subcommitte themselves have either physical or visual diabilities). They plan to finish the audit at a meeting hosted by the Royal National Institute for the Blind later in this month. The output will comprise a set of specific, recommended improvements to the ODF specification which we hope to see incorporated in a "1.1" version of the spec. later this year.

Second, Massachusetts' Information Technology Division has just issued a Request for Information (RFI) regarding Open Document Format Plug-ins for the Microsoft Office Suite. The goal of this RFI is to explore the possibility of an MS-Office plug-in or other convert to allow folks to keep using MS-Office but nontheless read and write ODF. This would address the immediate problem of any gaps in functionality that Windows Assistive Technologies have when used with ODF applications like StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, and IBM Workplace as compared to MS-Office. Here's a quote from their RFI:

And finally, the Open Document Format has been officially blessed as an ISO standard. You may now refer to ODF by its formal name "ISO/IEC 26300". There is also an ODF Alliance press release talking about this in more detail. (2006-05-03 15:49:04.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Accessible on-line English & German language instruction

The good folks at Brailcom in the Czech Republic have developed a suite of free, online English & German languages courses specifically geared to folks with visual impairments. They are presently offering intermediate and advanced courses, including courses specifically geared to native speakers of Czech, Slovak, Spanish, Norwegian, German, and English (these last two only for going into the other language).

From their about page:

One particularly neat thing about these on-line courses is that they've been developed and tested specifically to work in Mozilla Firefox and the KDE Konquerer web browsers on UNIX systems, and specifically with the Orca screen reader/magnifier (in addition to working with the Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, w3m, Links, and Lynx web browsers on a variety of platforms). What this means is that, other than the cost of the computer hardware, these sources are entirely free - delivered from a free website to run on free web browsers that work with free assistive technologies on free desktop environments. They've even developed a free Czech voice for the free Festival software text to speech system.

Given the incredibly high unemployment rate for people with visual impairments, it makes complete sense that these courses be offered free - as someone without employment will find it extremely difficult to get the thousands of dollars (or the thousands of Euros, or the tens of thousands of Czech Koruna) one would need to purchase an operating system and screen reader in order to take these courses otherwise.

It's also another example of what we've been saying at Sun for a little while now - that we're moving into the Participation Age, where one of the key values is sharing for the greater economic and social good it brings to all of us.

[26June06 follow-up: the Florida Division of Blind Services re-printed this blog entry in their June 2006 "Eye on DBS" newsletter. The blog reprint is here.] (2006-05-03 12:46:55.0) Permalink