Saturday March 25, 2006

ODF @ CSUN

The CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities came to a close today. While there were many fine sessions, presentations and events (including several by Sun), there was at least one in particular that is being watched very closely in Massachusetts: a panel discussion on Open Document Format Accessibility. In this nearly two hour session we explored the "who, what, where, when, and why" of OFD, the key accessibility issues in ODF use, had a discussion of the current state of things in Massachusetts around ODF Accessibility, looked at the current progress being made in identifying and closing accessibility gaps, and demonstrated the state of the art of accessibility provided by the two key ODF applications StarOffice and OpenOffice.org as used with assistive technologies on Windows and UNIX.

The panelists for this session were: Janina Sajka, principal of Capital Accessibility and chair of the Free Standards Group Accessibility Working Group; Myra Berloff, Director of the Massachusetts Office on Disability; Rich Schwerdtfeger, Distinguished Engineer, Accessibility Architect & Strategist at IBM; Malte Timmermann, Technical Architect for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org; and yours truly Peter Korn. Slides for the presentation are available in HTML and in ODF formats. Also, the good folks TV Worldwide - and most specifically their AT 508 channel - videotaped the session (along with a bunch of other videotaped CSUN sessions). The ODF Panel webcast is available currently only in Windows Media Format (the irony of which is painfully obvious, especially for anyone trying to view the video on a UNIX system...). Close captions, as well as non-proprietary formats for the video, are promised and should be up on the website "shortly". As that happens, and as audio-only recordings become available (there were at least one I was aware of), I'll update this blog entry to contain pointers to them. [Note also that the videos may not play behind some firewalls...]

I'll leave it to others to comment on the contents of the presentation. I thought the questions we received were insightful, and I believe all of the panelists had a number of thoughtful and engaging conversations afterward. As was clear from the demos we gave, an awful lot of accessibility support is there with at least StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, and we also still have a bunch of work to do.

[28June06 update: an audio recording [49 MB] for this Open document Format Accessibility panel is now available. Also, see this blog entry for links to other recordings from CSUN] (2006-03-25 23:49:59.0) Permalink