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.