Friday May 26, 2006 
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. |
Friday May 26, 2006 OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee recommendations Begun at the start of this year, the OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee has just completed its first assigned task: an accessibility evaluation of the ~700 page ODF 1.0 specification. Producing this evaluation was the formal statement of purpose of this subcommittee:
Statement of purpose
The Subcommittee completed the report during a two-day meeting hosted by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, at the RNIB Employment and Learning Centre in Edinburgh. Their transmittal of this report to the Technical Committee, along with all electronic correspondence in the OASIS ODF TC, is public and can be found here (making the OASIS ODF effort an exemplar of transparency and openness). You can find the complete report here in ODF format, and in PDF format, and in XML format. Here is the Executive Summary of their evaluation:
The ODF Accessibility Subcommittee has identified 9 accessibility issues in ODF 1.0, and proposes candidate solutions to them. With these changes, we believe that ODF will meet or exceed the accessibility support provided in all other office file formats as well as that specified in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Furthermore, these modifications will enable ODF to support the authoring of DAISY digital talking books, a worldwide standard used by blind, low vision, learning disabled, and other print impaired communities. The recommended changes address:
Furthermore, we request that the appropriate text be added to the ODF specification to indicate how this accessibility meta data is mapped by the authoring tool to a platform accessibility API as well as their accessibility applicability in the specification. To fully address the needs of people with disabilities in using ODF, an ODF application must meet a number of accessibility requirements as well. ODF application developers should be provided with implementation guidelines to meet these requirements. The fact that this evaluation only turned up 9 accessibility issues out of such a large specification says a lot about how much was already right in the file format itself. The fact that in such a short time accessibility was able to join an open standards process as an invited guest, and make these contributions says a lot about the kinds of benefits to accessibility we can realize from a truly open standards process like we have in OASIS ODF. And I'm delighted to say that this subcommittee plans to continue working on ODF - to start tackling problems that have never been solved in office suite accessibility, including: effective blind access to slide presentations; partnering with the W3C to tackle SVG graphics accessibility; better access to graphs and charts; and improved navigation models for tabular data. It is important to note that this is all work on the file format. Separate from this is the issue of how well the various assistive technology applications (on the various operating systems) work with and support the various ODF applications. Work on that is happening in parallel to this work on the file format. There will be more to report on that in the coming months... (2006-05-26 21:56:43.0) Permalink |
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