Don't panic

Imagine you are about to give an Impress presentation on a conference, but then your laptop slips to the floor. Now display colors look funny, and even worse, the mouse or touchpad doesn't work any more.

The built-in accessibility features of OOo will take care of your presentation. You can easily switch the display to high contrast mode to fix the wrong looking colors, and you can manage every aspect of OOo from the keyboard, without a mouse. Although this needs a bit of practise, because it's a new skill to be learned.

OOo already offers many helpful accessibility features out of the box

• Open Help (F1) and enter 'accessibility' on the Index tab page. Double-click the links for more information. If you cannot double-click, press Ctrl+F6 to set the focus to the help content page, then press Tab to move to the hyperlink of your choice. Press Enter to follow the link.
  

To use the high contrast display mode

1. In OOo, choose Tools - Options - OOo - Accessibility.
2. Select "Automatically detect high contrast mode of operating system".
3. Open the display command center of your operating system or desktop. For example, using Gnome, you click the Launch button (Ctrl+Esc), then choose Preferences - Desktop Preferences - Display - Theme. Select the High Contrast theme.

Now OOo and all your desktop applications that support high contrast show high contrast.

To remove an object from a slide using the keyboard

1. Open your Impress file. Press Ctrl+O,  then enter the file name. Press Shift+Tab to focus the file list, use Arrow Up and Arrow Down to navigate. Use Enter to enter a subfolder, use Backspace to leave a subfolder.
2. In the presentation file, use Page Up and Page Down to navigate to the slide.
3. Press Tab repeatedly until the object you want to remove is selected.
4. Press Del. If you don't want to delete the selected object, you can for example press the Arrow keys to move the object, or press Shift+F10 for the context menu.
   

In addition to the already built-in features, you can use several external hardware and software tools together with OOo. Those tools include screen reader software that reads out loud the contents of the screen, screen magnifyer software that zooms in to the cursor, and more.  Depending on your operating system platform, you may have to install additional software drivers and the Java Access Bridge software.

The Online Help helps to get you started.

Setting Text Language

 In OOo you can change the language of the user interface (scroll down to see how), and you can call a wizard which helps you install more dictionaries.

1. Open the Online Help (F1) on the Index tab page.
2. Enter "languages; selecting" as index entry. Read the help page.

The language for spellcheck, hyphenation, and thesaurus is an attribute for a whole document or for a selection of words.

1. Choose Tools - Options - Language Settings - Writing Aids for a list of available language modules.
2. Click the top Edit button to see which dictionaries are installed for the current language. Use the drop-down listbox to see which languages are installed.
3. If the listbox doesn't list the language that you want, see "Adding More Text Languages".

Adding More Text Languages

For OpenOffice.org up to and including version 2.4.1: 

1. Choose File - Wizards - Install new dictionaries to open a Writer document which helps you to install more languages.
2. The document contains pages in many different languages. Click your own language on the first page to see the following instructions in your own language.
3. Click the big button in the middle of the document page. This starts a macro to display more info and download the dictionary files (see image).
   
   
   
   
4. Select to install the new files for the current user only or for all users (which requires write permission to the shared folder).
5. Click Next.
6. Click "Retrieve the list" button. After some short delay, you see a list of available Spelling dictionaries.
7. Select the languages for Spelling and click Next.
8. Click "Retrieve the list" and select languages for Hyphenation and for Thesaurus.
9. The macro downloads the files to the appropriate folder. After you click Finish, you must close OOo (including the Quickstarter), and restart OOo.

For OpenOffice.org 3.0:

1. Open a Writer document.
2. Choose Tools - Language - More Dictionaries Online.

This command opens your web browser on a page where you can select more languages. The language can be downloaded as an extension, and after downloading you click the Add button in the Extension Manager to install that language.

Setting UI Language

A standard installation of OOo will give you a user interface (UI) of your chosen language.
Most users download the American English version, which gives you english menu commands and english Online Help.  If you want another language for the menus (and for Online Help, if available in that language), change the UI language as follows.

1. Choose Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages.
2. Select another UI language in the "User interface" listbox.
3. Click OK and restart the OOo software.
4. If the listbox doesn't list the language that you want, see "Adding More UI Languages".
   

Adding More UI Languages

This is not as easy as the Adding More Text Languages operation.

1. Open your Web browser and enter http://oootranslation.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/
2. Select and download the correct language pack for your version of OOo.
3. Close OOo (also close the Quickstarter, if you enabled it).
   
4. Install the language pack. Either double-click the exe file, or un-something the .tar.gz file according to standard practice on your platform.