Tuesday September 27, 2005 
The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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Peter Korn's Weblog The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc. |
Tuesday September 27, 2005 StarOffice 8 released - with new accessibility featuresSun's StarOffice 8 (based on OpenOffice.org) was released earlier today. In fact, already one University campus has standardized on it! There are many new features, including improvements to Microsoft Office compatibility, support for the new OASIS OpenDocument format (which the State of Massachusettes is adopting - see pages 18-19 of the Massachusettes Enterprise Information Technology Architecture version 3.5 [available in OpenDocument format too of course]), support for the W3C XForms standard, and new migration tools to help convert the Visual Basic macros in MS Word and Excel documents to StarOffice Basic. But the new features I most want to highlight are the accessibility enhancements. To my mind, the key accessibility improvements in StarOffice 8 (and the shortly-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 2.0) are:
You can get a copy of StarOffice 8 right now for Windows, Linux, Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC; in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Swedish! It's nice to that at the same time that StarOffice accessibility improves, acceptance and adoption of StarOffice goes up. Some might question an implied cause and effect relationship between those two facts, but I'm content to know we're clearly on the right track in both of these areas. (2005-09-27 13:55:00.0) Permalink Comments [1] Post a Comment: Comments are closed for this entry. |
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But see http://qa.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=5383
It looks like JAWS 7 and OpenOffice 2 don't get along too well, at least in one person's tests.
Posted by Dan Kegel on October 27, 2005 at 10:14 PM PDT #