Monday September 10, 2007

IBM joins OpenOffice.org community - will contribute IAccessible2 support

In a press release today, IBM has announced it will be joining the OpenOffice.org community, with an initial staff of 35 developers joining the team of Sun and other community developers in ongoing development of OpenOffice.org. Particularly notable for us is the second sentence of the press release (emphasis added): "IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org."

As noted in the accompanying FAQ to the press release, the initial accessibility code contribution is IBM's work to support IAccessible2, an open source accessibility framework being standardized as part of the Open Accessibility Group of the Linux Foundation (and which is essentially a port of the original OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API to Microsoft Windows). As both the JAWS and WindowEyes screen readers are supporting IAccessible2 (and have been testing that support with IBM Lotus Notes 8 - itself a derivative of OpenOffice.org), this contribution brings with it the support of two key Windows assistive technologies for the blind to OpenOffice.org. As there have been nearly 100 million downloads of OpenOffice.org, and certainly tens of millions of users, this contribution also significantly adds to the momentum behind the IAccessible2 framework on Windows - encouraging further adoption and use of it by additional Windows AT vendors and mainstream products. (2007-09-10 16:28:15.0) Permalink