Friday May 23, 2008

ODF Accessibility Guidelines now an OASIS Committee Specification

To further underscore the importance of accessibility, the OASIS OpenDocument Format Technical Committee made a request to the OASIS OpenDocument Format accessibility subcommittee for us to submit our completed ODF Accessibility Guidelines to be approved as a formal Committee Specification. Such approval would elevate the document, making it not just a working document of our subcommittee, but a formal Technical Committee Specification.

Balloting by the Technical Committee recently completed, and I'm happy to report that you can now find the Committee Specification of the Open Document Format v1.1 Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0. Find the ODF edition and the PDF edition published as well.

Folks implementing OpenDocument Format support in their applications (as Microsoft is now doing) should use this document to help them make full and appropriate use of the accessibility features in ODF, and to properly expose them in their application's user interface. Specific guidance includes information on things like theme support and keyboard navigation of the UI and content and how ODF applications should support assistive technologies (this last should be done by utilizing the accessibility frameworks supported by assistive technologies on the platforms they are running on).

As an aside, this last piece of guidance is also part of the recently issued report to the U.S. Access Board made by the Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committeee (agreed to by IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and others on the committee), which states that: "On platforms that support AT-E&IT interoperability, software that provides user interface components must either use the accessibility services provided by platform software or other services to cooperate with assistive technologies, when such services allow the software to meet the accessibility provisions of this standard." It is wonderful to see how the IT industry has moved to embrace the approach to programmatic accessibility that Sun first implemented in the Java Platform in 1997... (2008-05-23 14:23:33.0) Permalink