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]