Tuesday September 19, 2006

OpenOffice.org Conference presentation videos available

The OpenOffice.org community hosts a OpenOffice.org yearly conference. This year it was in Lyon, France from September 11-13. Videos of the presentations are now available - and can be viewed within your browser or downloaded (in of course the open standard Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis formats).

I would particularly recommend the following presentations for those interested in accessibility and Open Document Format (alas none of them are close captioned):

1. Panel session with Eduardo Gutentag, Bob Sutor, Rob Weir, Charles-H. Schulz: "OpenDocument, Open Revolution" in video in your browser or downlodable video or downloadable audio

2. Robert Weir: "A Technical Comparison> ISO/IEC 26300 vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (Ecma International TC45 OOXML WD 1.3)" in video in your browser or downlodable video or downloadable audio

3. Michael Bemmer: "OpenOffice.org 2.x and beyond" in video in your browser or downlodable video or downloadable audio

4. Malte Timmermann: "OpenOffice.org and ODF Accessibility" in video in your browser or downlodable video or downloadable audio

There are many other talks you might find interesting; things like using OpenOffice.org in high schools in Slovenia, the "re-computerisation of Cambodia" based on OpenOffice.org 2.0, Novell Corporation's migration to OpenOffice.org, and OpenOffice.org in Vienna City's Administration. The OpenOffice.org conference is not a high budget affair, and the videos don't have broadcast television production values. But the information is very educational, timely, and wonderfully available to all. (2006-09-19 13:31:34.0) Permalink

Congratulations Jim, MacArthur "genius"!

Jim Fruchterman has been a force in the accessibility and assistive technology field for nearly two decades. He started Arkenstone in 1989, a nonprofit company producing reading machines for the disabled community. After having sold that to Freedom Scientific, he founded another nonprofit - Benetech - that continues to work on technologies for people with disabilities (such as their Bookshare.org on-line library for people with print impairments), but has expanded into Human Rights issues, and Landmine Detection among other work.

Today Jim received today one of the MacArthur 'genius' awards - a "no strings attached" $500,000 "vote of confidence" in his work at Benetech. The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice article about it. Also, the MacArthur Foundation has a writeup of Jim's work

Congratulations Jim! (2006-09-19 10:47:18.0) Permalink Comments [1]