Thursday November 12, 2009 Malte about some of his work at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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Thursday November 12, 2009 Odt2DAISY - create DAISY Digital Talking Books with OpenOffice.org! Vincent Spiewak has finished his OpenOffice.org extension for converting ODF text documents to DAISY Digital Talking Books - you can find the press release here. The extension not only creates XML content, but also can make use of different text to speech engines, so you will have fully featured talking books. I recommend this extension for everybody who wants to create DAISY books. Binaries and source files are available on sourceforge, the license is LGPL 3. If you never heard of DAISY before, you might want to look at the screen casts which will show you how it works. Thank you very much for this great OpenOffice.org extension!
Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 12 2009, 01:10:09 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [1]
Friday December 12, 2008 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 finalized WCAG 2.0 was published today as a final Web Standard "W3C Recommendation"! This is great, since many people were waiting for that for a long time now. The first version of WCAG was published in 1999 - it mainly concentrated on HTML and absolutly didn't meet current requirements anymore. The old standard didn't allow scripting, so all Web 2.0 applications would violate that. Now scripting is not only accepted, but even included as techniques to enhance accessibility! If you are interested in this topic (and as a web designer, author or developer you should care!), I think the best starting page is The WCAG 2.0 Documents. Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Dec 12 2008, 05:46:21 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday November 13, 2008 odt2dtbook 1.0.1 There is a new and improved version of the odt2dtbook extension for OpenOffice.org available! For details about the changes, I suggest reading Dominique's blog, since he is one of the authors of that extension... Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 13 2008, 05:39:04 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]
Tuesday November 11, 2008 IAccessible2, or - IBM to contribute to the OpenOffice.org 3 code line! This was one of my personal highlights in the keynotes from the 6th OpenOffice.org conference last week: In his talk, Michael Karasick, Director of Lotus Development IBM China, has promised that IBM would eventually contribute to the OOo 3 code line. And he especially mentioned IAccessible2. So I hope to see this happening soon, volunteering to work together with the Team from IBM on this. Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 11 2008, 10:43:32 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday October 17, 2008 Open Source Accessibility Funding Working on open source accessibility for more than 7 years now, I am happy to see that the AEGIS project will invest €12.6m into accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions. Leading our OpenOffice.org accessibility efforts since 2001, I can tell you how difficult it can be to convince people to spend time and resource to work on accessibility related stuff "under the hood", since probably more than 99% of the users won't recognize anything from it.
Now with the AEGIS funding, I am sure a lot of wonderful things in the area of accessibility can be achieved in different projects. More details about the AEGIS project can be found in Peter Korn's blog, where you can also find some details about Sun's accessibility efforts... Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 17 2008, 09:10:35 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday October 02, 2008 odt2dtbook - a DAISY export extension for OpenOffice.org If you are interested in DAISY export, this extension for OpenOffice.org might be your friend. Vincent Spiewak and Dominique Archambault won Gold for their work on this extension, as part of the Innovation in Open Source Community Award Program. Congratulations! :)
Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 02 2008, 07:25:59 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday May 30, 2008 OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Mac OSX Accessibility Our engineers here in Hamburg are spending a lot of efforts into the native port of OpenOffice.org for the Mac platform. One part of these efforts is to implement the Mac Accessibility APIs, to make OOo as accessible as possible with AT tools. My colleague Peter Korn just wrote a very good blog about this, so instead of duplication all the information, I recommend reading that one if you are interested in the details.
Posted by Malte Timmermann ( May 30 2008, 09:52:09 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]
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
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".
Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Dec 15 2006, 11:33:39 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]
Monday July 31, 2006 OpenOffice.org Conference 2006 The schedule for the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) is now available on http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2006/schedule.html. The conference will be in Lyon (France), the general sessions take place September Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th. There are a bunch of ODF sessions on Wednesday My session about OOo and ODF Accessibility is scheduled for 3pm. 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. 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]
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