Thursday March 20, 2008

Back from CSUN

Last week I was attending the CSUN conference - probably the biggest and most exciting Accessibility conference in the world.

The different presentations made it clear: Web Accessibility, ARIA and AJAX are still very hot topics.

For Windows Accessibility, IAccessible2 is still making a lot of progress. Some Screen Readers already have support for it, and I hope we will have it in OpenOffice.org soon.

I gave a small talk in an IAccessible2 session, my presentation can be found here.

Of course I have used the cool PDF export in OpenOffice.org, which allows you to create well accessible, tagged PDF. Unfortunately, creating tagged PDF is not the default, because of the increased file size. I hope we will change the default eventually. For now, use the "Export as PDF..." menu item in the file menu, which will give you a dialog where you can check the option to create tagged PDF. The tool bar item skips this dialog.

In parallel to IAccessible2 on Windows, we are also working on support for the Mac OS X Accessibility Framework!

We have shown the latest builds to some AT vendors, and it seems they are very exited about this. From what I heard, not many applications on Mac OS X have good support for this right now.

So with all our Accessibility work going on, I am very confident that OpenOffice.org 3.x will be very accessible on many different platforms, with native support for the platform specific Accessibility frameworks!

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Mar 20 2008, 07:12:47 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday August 20, 2007

Accessibility on Linux via Orca - OpenOffice.org and other...

Darragh Ó Héiligh, a blind Linux user in Ireland, has just posted an audio introduction of Fedora Linux with Orca.

My colleague Peter Korn has a nice summary of this in his blog.

I especially like the final comment. After noting the responsiveness of Orca with TTSynth and OpenOffice.org: "It's just getting the job done faster than it is in Windows."

I like it for many reasons

• Orca is e great screen reader - and it is open source!
  
• It shows that it was worth spending some extra time in the  native UAA/ATK bridge, which we have introduced with OpenOffice.org 2.0.1.
• It shows that a good accessibility architecture, like available with GNOME, pays off

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Aug 20 2007, 12:01:26 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday December 15, 2006

IBM has announced IAccessible2

Yesterday IBM has announced "IAccessible2".

IAccessible2 is an API (application programming interface) designed for Windows.
It fills the gap between existing Accessibility API called MSAA or IAccessible, which is not very complete, and full featured Accessibility API like in GNOME (ATK), Java (JAA) or OpenOffice.org (UAA).

Actually, the work is directly derived from the OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API, as you can see on the Sun copyright in the IDL files.

The API is not proprietary, but given to the Free Standards Group for further standardization.

Because of IAccessible2 is just extending IAccessible, not replacing it, AT vendors should be able to support that quite easily. This should result in much better support from a broader range of Assistive Technology on Windows for Mozilla and OpenOffice.org in the future!

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Dec 15 2006, 11:33:39 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday July 31, 2006

OpenOffice.org Conference 2006

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Jul 31 2006, 12:28:52 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday July 10, 2006

StarOffice, OpenOffice.org and Accessibility

It happens very often that people think they can't use StarOffice or OpenOffice.org because they need Assistive Technology (AT).

This is not true!

StarOffice or OpenOffice.org have a lot of built-in support for Assistive Technology.

The UNO Accessibility API (UAA) delivers all information that AT needs.
Currently no AT has built-in support for UAA, but the UAA is bridged to Java Accessibility, so every AT that supports Java Accessibility also supports StarOffice and OpenOffice.org automatically.

So if you re unsure if StarOffice or OpenOffice.org works with your AT, just download OpenOffice.org for free, and give it a try!

Some configuration hints can be found on http://openoffice.org/access.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Jul 10 2006, 09:31:06 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]