Monday December 10, 2007

Testing ODF document accessibility (and the ODF accessibility guidelines used in the tests)

Recently IBM announced the availability of the Accessibility Tools Framework, and specifically the new aDesigner tool for testing accessibility. Particularly cool in the new aDesigner is the suite of tests for ODF document accessibility. I had the pleasure of seeing demos of this work nearly two years ago, and have had to keep patient until now to download it from alphaworks and play with it. I'm not good at patience, but I can report that the wait was worth it.

Developed by a host of folks at the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory - including two OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee members Dr. Chieko Asakawa and Dr. Hironobu Takagi - the tool leverages the work we did in that subcommittee - and specifically the Open Document Format v1.1 Accessibility Guidelines Version 1.0 - to examine ODF documents and highlight access problems. Using a three-pane window approach, it shows the original document in the left pane (using OpenOffice.org as the document renderer), and a variety of end-user views in the right pane. At the bottom of the window is a pane that will list the problems found. The right or "view" pane will provide visualizations of the document for blind users as well as users with a variety of vision impairments (you can vary a wide range of vision impairment parameters to simulate). Particularly powerful in the blind user visualization is the the way that aDesigner will use color to graphically show how long it will take a prototypical screen reader user to navigate to a particular section of the document (hint: the more you use headers & subheaders and intra-document navigation links, the faster it will be for a screen reader user to find & read something). Of course this has application in the use of creating DAISY format books as well. Another powerful visualization feature in aDesigner for headings/subheadings is that in the visualization pane, only those attributes that are "structural" are shown, so something that is in 20 point bold (and so "looks" like a header") is shown as normal text unless it is marked formally as a header. In this way, a quick visual scan of the visualization pane will show you where you have failed to use headers appropriately.

And speaking of the Open Document Format v1.1 Accessibility Guidelines Version 1.0, I have been remiss in my blogging responsibilities and failed to mention that this document is available for public review, with the review period ending December 21st. To my knowledge, this document represents the first of its kind - instructions for developers of an office suite telling them what they must do to support accessibility and fully enable all of the access features of the document format. (2007-12-10 20:32:52.0) Permalink