Peter Korn's Weblog

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:

The Commonwealth seeks information pertaining to the existence or development of a "plug-in component" or other converter options to be used with Microsoft Office that would allow Microsoft Office to easily open, render, and save to ODF files, and also allow translation of documents between Microsoft's binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF. Respondents responding to this proposal need not be on state contract.

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).

The general aim of the project is to reduce the unemployment rate of the blind and visually impaired. By improving the skills of the visually impaired and raising the level of awareness of the professional community regarding the skills and competences of the blind and visually impaired, it is hoped that this project will make a solid contribution to achieving this goal.

Specifically our partnership has developed English and German language modules for the blind and visually impaired, which are available using Internet. The project seeks to increase the language and cultural skills of blind employees, whilst raising their awareness of employment possibilities and aiding further personal development.

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.


	Peter Korn's Weblog The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Some recent developments in ODF Accessibility

Accessible on-line English & German language instruction