Thursday March 08, 2007

Accessible Open Document Exchange Formats - workshop, conference, and presentation in Berlin

Last week I was in Berlin, attending (and presenting at) a Workshop on Open Document Exchange Formats, which in turn was the first day of a two day Advancing eGovernment Conference, held under the auspices of the Germany Presidency of the EU. I was specifically invited to talk about "Improving Accessibility in Open Document Exchange Formats".

The desires that led to the development of the OpenDocument format - guaranteeing long term access to documents because they aren't encoded in a proprietary format that, like Word*Star of old, may not be supported in the future or only at great expense - are shared by many European Governments. Perhaps in part because of Microsoft's recent entry with their Open XML format and their attempt to also make it an ISO standard (as OpenDocument format is already an ISO standard), this workshop generalized the issues under the umbrella of "Open Document Exchange Formats". And just as the more general issues of long term access apply to the general case (and not just ODF), likewise the accessibility issues apply to the general case as well.

I want to share with you a few of the key points I made in my presentation to the ~100 invited guests from 21 member states that were in the audience. After briefly introducing the topic of accessibility, I quoted two directives from the European Council eAccessibility Resolution of February 2003 on improving the access of people with disabilities to the knowledge based society:

Next, I quoted two directives from the 2006 Riga declaration on "ICT for an Inclusive Society":

To me these quotes speak clearly and unequivocally to two key aspects of any adopted open document exchange format: the needs of people with disabilities must be addressed, and people with disabilities must participate in the process of addressing those needs. As I was raised in Berkeley - the birthplace of the Center for Independent Living - this latter directive is familiar to me as the Independent Living movement slogan "nothing about us, without us."

Out of these directives in 2003 and 2006, and from my own experience both in the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility subcommittee, working with folks on accessibility in the State of Massachusetts' adoption of OpenDocument format, and working on accessibility in multiple platforms, I proposed the adoption of the following four Open Document Exchange Format accessibility principles:

The third point was particularly well received, especially by the delegates from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, both of whom I chatted with afterward. The European Union is a diverse group of (currently) 27 member states and nearly half a billion people. In some member states like Germany and The Netherlands, people with disabilities have a relatively rich support network with expensive assistive technologies provided to many citizens and employees. Other member states like the Czech Republic are not in a position to provide their citizens with the expensive assistive technologies that enable access to the Information Society. In fact, it is for these cost reasons that the two regions Extremadura and Andalusia in Spain use open source GNU/Linux in all public schools - with the accessible GNOME desktop and assistive technologies like Orca and GOK providing the much needed technology access solutions.

I ended my presentation with a series of demos. I showed the Orca screen reader, the GNOME On-screen keyboard, and the Dasher alternate text entry system on Solaris Express Developer Edition, all working well with OpenOffice.org. Then I rebooted to Windows, and showed the JAWS screen reader working with Microsoft Office opening, reading, and saving an OpenDocument text file - all thanks to the now available for download StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows users read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format. I finished my demo and presentation with a demonstration of a pre-release version of the Duxbury Braille Translator, translating the text of the OpenDocument format slides I'd just presented into Braille.

The presentation was well received. I think this was the first time many of the attendees had seen (and heard) a screen reader. Quite a few came up to me afterward, and affirmed the importance of addressing accessibility requirements in any adopted open document exchange format.

At the end of the Advancing eGovernment Conference the following day, two key points from the Workshop on Open Document Exchange Formats were noted in their formal conclusions of the eGovernment Conference:

P.S. It turns out I was not the only person talking about accessibility at the ODEF workshop. I was pleased that Jean Paoli of Microsoft also made (a very brief) mention of supporting people with disabilities in his presentation. However, when I asked him if he could name any of the accessibility experts, or people with disabilities (even Microsoft employees!) who had reviewed their Open XML file format for accessibility, he couldn't give me even one name. (2007-03-08 18:15:01.0) Permalink