Friday July 28, 2006

ODF v1.1 committee specification available for public review

The OASIS Open Document Technical Committee has been working on version 1.1 of the Open Document Format specification, which in large measure is focused on addressing the accessibility concerns raised by the accessibility subcommittee. Today OASIS has announced the public review of the Open Document Format v1.1 specification (you can view the PDF version of the specification as well). The 60-day review period runs from 27 July 2006 through 25 September 2006.

This marks a significant milestone in the development of the Open Document Format standard - open and public review of an update to the open ODF file format, whose updates (primarily for accessibility) were themselves developed openly with the input from experts in accessibility technology including multiple individuals with a variety of disabilities. To my knowledge the only similarly open process for a file format - and specifically explicitly open to people with disabilities and experts in accessibility technology - is that of the World Wide Web and the Web Accessibility Initiative. Certainly no other office document file format has had this level of public openness, nor this level of participation by individuals with disabilities and experts in accessibility technology.

And that open process continues. All interested parties are warmly invited to review this public draft v1.1 specification, and to share their comments. Comments for this (and all OASIS ODF documents) should be sent by following the instructions at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=office. And further, all such comments can be viewed by the public, at: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/.

After this 60-day public review, all of the comments received will be reviewed. There may then be a second draft published, incorporating changes in response to those comments and a second - shorter - public review period. And when the OASIS and the ODF Technical Committee is satisfied, it will be put forward as ODF version 1.1. If all goes on schedule, this will happen before the year is out. (2006-07-28 15:30:57.0) Permalink

Thursday July 27, 2006

CSUN accessibility sessions video now available for download

With assistance from Joanie Diggs at Carroll Tech (part of the Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts), I'm happy to report that downloadable video editions of the CSUN accessibility sessions are now available. These supplement the audio-only editions that are already available, and are encoded in the open source Ogg Theora format. Ogg Theora players are available for all desktop systems; the latest Helix Player (known on Windows as Real Player 10) can play them. Like the companion Ogg Vorbis format, Ogg Theora provides better compression at similar quality (or better quality at similar file sizes) than their commercial and proprietary counterparts.

Here is the Introduction to Orca video recording [53 MB].
Here is the Introduction to Orca Scripting video recording [45 MB].
Here is the Open Document Format Accessibility Panel discussion video recording [96 MB].

Note: the original streaming videos remain available for viewing from TV Worldwide (and still require that the client viewing them is a Windows system). See their CSUN coverage page for these three sessions, among others, that they are hosting there. (2006-07-27 11:06:36.0) Permalink

Monday July 24, 2006

Yet another option for accessible reading of ODF documents

Daniel Carrera at the Open Document Fellowship has developed a text-only ODF reader (which is part of their more general ODF Viewer project) that converts ODF to HTML and then invokes the Lynx web browser to read it. I just downloaded this early "alpha" edition of the code, and started playing with it. Thus far it opened my two test text files just fine (one of which was committee draft #2 of the ODF 1.1 specification - a 735 page document that worked out to some 3,416 "pages" on my Lynx 80x24 character terminal window). Unfortunately it didn't do anything useful with a test spreadsheet I gave it.

At the moment this version works on UNIX systems, but as Lynx also runs on Windows and Macintosh, and the conversion is simply an XSLT transformation, there is little reason why this couldn't be easily ported to Windows and Macintosh. Note: there is also a gecko plugin (as part of their general ODF viewer project), making it easy to display ODF files in the Firefox web browser (and Firefox is now well supported by the JAWS and WindowEyes screen readers).

It is delightful how rapidly - and from such a wide variety of places - work is proceeding on making ODF accessible to people with disabilities. And much of the reason for this speed and success is because the ODF file format is open, and readers/writers can be implemented free of charge and license restriction! (2006-07-24 17:19:55.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday July 11, 2006

ODF plug-in update: Microsoft funding a plug-in effort

As has been noted in the Wall Street Journal, in Network World and Tech World, in ZDNet, in computing in the UK, in warm tones from MSNBC, and with a more critical eye in Ars Technica, and with similar criticality in eWeek, Microsoft has announced their sponsorship of an open source project to develop an ODF plug-in to Office 2007. While this falls short of the approach I outlined in these pages at the outset of the ODF Accessibility issues in Massachusetts - namely of directly support for ODF in their Office suite - it demonstrates a recognition on their part of the importance of ODF, and at least some desire on their part to allow customers who pay for an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 to obtain an unsupported, third-party (but hey, it's open source so who can complain?) tool to be able to work with ODF files.

In addition to the many articles in the mainstream press about this move, I recommend reading Pamela Jones' analysis at Groklaw, and also Andy Updegrove's analysis at the Standards Blog, and finally (and most especially) Joanie Diggs' thoughts in the Carroll Center blog. While there are a number of concerns voiced about this move (Pamela is particularly suspicious about the second class status that this plug-in approach will be relegate ODF and PDF and all formats Microsoft might find competitive or threatening), I believe it validates Massachusetts' decision - and the decisions of many many other governments and companies and institutions worldwide - to move to the ISO standard Open Document file format. It further adds yet another option to the growing ranks of plug-ins to Microsoft Office that allow MS-Office users to remain with that application and yet read and write ODF files - something especially important to users of existing assistive technology applications which have been heavily customized to work well with MS-Office.

Joanie Diggs quotes a section of the Microsoft press release in her blog about Microsoft's announcement, and asks for my comments.

The quote from the Microsoft press release is:

and the comment/question from Joanie:

I personally see this less as defensiveness and more as disingenuousness. It is kinda like saying "our encryption system is more secure because we didn't have invited security experts look at it". Certainly Microsoft has had engineers working on accessibility for some time, and these folks may have done a thoughtful and capable job of ensuring that the MS-Office file formats contain everything that is needed to support accessibility (though, without an independent analysis, how can you be certain?). Likewise, as I've pointed out in these pages, the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org folks who developed the XML file format that was the basis for ODF had been working on accessibility in StarOffice/OpenOffice.org for over 5 years (with strong input from someone who helped write one of the first graphical screen readers for Windows), and much of ODF came from W3C specifications (e.g. SVG and xForms), which themselves went through a thorough accessibility review through the Web Accessibility Inititative processes.

So, does the existance of a group of accessibility experts, as part of an open process in an open standards body mean that the ODF file format better or worse than the MS-Office file format? Clearly it doesn't; it only means that accessibility is taken very seriously in ODF. To make an accessibility comparison of the two file formats, you need to undertake an independent review of ODF and the Microsoft Office file formats for accessibility, and see how they both fare. And it turns out, someone has already done that!

Dr. Cheiko Asakawa and and Rich Schwerdtfeger of IBM did a careful and thorough analysis of ODF and Microsoft Office file format accessibility. They found that Microsoft Office's file format failed to provide for relative font sizes, failed to encode table headers and logical tab orders in documents, and failed to provide label association for forms. Furthermore, outside of the accessibility context, the Microsoft Office file format provides no way to encode image maps (with or without appropriate ALT tags), or 3D shapes (both of which ODF provides for). Their analysis also found accessibility issues with ODF, all of which have been addressed in the ODF 1.1 proposal submitted to the ODF Technical Committee. So as I noted in late May, with these incorporated into ODF 1.1 later this year, ODF will be the most accessible document file format, bar none.

So, I guess in a way Microsoft was correct when they said in their press release "certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats." At least when it applies to accessibility and ODF 1.1 later this year, exporting an ODF 1.1 file to Microsoft Office file format will mean a loss of some accessibility information, because there is simply no way to express that information in the Microsoft Office file format... (2006-07-11 13:38:32.0) Permalink

Monday July 10, 2006

U.S. Access Board advisory committee members named

The United States Access Board is "an independent Federal agency devoted to accessibility for people with disabilities." Created in 1973 to ensure access to federal funded facilities, its purview has expanded with passage of Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to include telecommunications accessibility; and further expanded with passage of the 1998 ammendments to Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to include federal purchases of "electronic and information technology". Pursiant to that expanded purview, the Access Board has developed a set of Telecommunication Act Accessibility Guidelines and a set of Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards. For technology companies like Sun, it is these latter guidelines that have been a major force and organizing principle for much of our technology accessibility work.

Both Section 508 (of the Rehabilitation Act) and Section 255 (of the Telecommunications Act) specify that the technical accessibility guidelines/standards developed by the Access Board be periodically updated. Earlier this year that Access Board issued a notice that they were forming an "Advisory Committee for Refresh" of both the Section 508 standards and the Section 255 accessibility guidelines. Here is the formal notice in the Federal Register (and also the PDF version).

The Access Board has now announced the composition of the Advisory Committee (and also published this in the Federal Register - with the PDF excerpt here).

My understanding is that there will be around a half-dozen multi-day meetings, open to the public, with the first one at the end of September this year. Earl Johnson, the founder of Sun's accessibility team, was Sun's representative to the first Section 508 advisory committee. I'm looking forward to picking up that mantle when these meetings begin later this year.

P.S. It is interesting to note that three of the members of the Access Board advisory committee - IBM, the Paciello Group, and Sun - are also members of the OASIS ODF accessibility subcommittee. Likewise, a slightly different three of the members of the Access Board advisory committee - Adobe, IBM, and Sun - are also members of the Free Standards Group Accessibility Workgroup. I'm looking forward to some cross-pollination between these three groups... (2006-07-10 14:25:13.0) Permalink