Tuesday July 11, 2006

ODF plug-in update: Microsoft funding a plug-in effort

As has been noted in the Wall Street Journal, in Network World and Tech World, in ZDNet, in computing in the UK, in warm tones from MSNBC, and with a more critical eye in Ars Technica, and with similar criticality in eWeek, Microsoft has announced their sponsorship of an open source project to develop an ODF plug-in to Office 2007. While this falls short of the approach I outlined in these pages at the outset of the ODF Accessibility issues in Massachusetts - namely of directly support for ODF in their Office suite - it demonstrates a recognition on their part of the importance of ODF, and at least some desire on their part to allow customers who pay for an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 to obtain an unsupported, third-party (but hey, it's open source so who can complain?) tool to be able to work with ODF files.

In addition to the many articles in the mainstream press about this move, I recommend reading Pamela Jones' analysis at Groklaw, and also Andy Updegrove's analysis at the Standards Blog, and finally (and most especially) Joanie Diggs' thoughts in the Carroll Center blog. While there are a number of concerns voiced about this move (Pamela is particularly suspicious about the second class status that this plug-in approach will be relegate ODF and PDF and all formats Microsoft might find competitive or threatening), I believe it validates Massachusetts' decision - and the decisions of many many other governments and companies and institutions worldwide - to move to the ISO standard Open Document file format. It further adds yet another option to the growing ranks of plug-ins to Microsoft Office that allow MS-Office users to remain with that application and yet read and write ODF files - something especially important to users of existing assistive technology applications which have been heavily customized to work well with MS-Office.

Joanie Diggs quotes a section of the Microsoft press release in her blog about Microsoft's announcement, and asks for my comments.

The quote from the Microsoft press release is:

and the comment/question from Joanie:

I personally see this less as defensiveness and more as disingenuousness. It is kinda like saying "our encryption system is more secure because we didn't have invited security experts look at it". Certainly Microsoft has had engineers working on accessibility for some time, and these folks may have done a thoughtful and capable job of ensuring that the MS-Office file formats contain everything that is needed to support accessibility (though, without an independent analysis, how can you be certain?). Likewise, as I've pointed out in these pages, the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org folks who developed the XML file format that was the basis for ODF had been working on accessibility in StarOffice/OpenOffice.org for over 5 years (with strong input from someone who helped write one of the first graphical screen readers for Windows), and much of ODF came from W3C specifications (e.g. SVG and xForms), which themselves went through a thorough accessibility review through the Web Accessibility Inititative processes.

So, does the existance of a group of accessibility experts, as part of an open process in an open standards body mean that the ODF file format better or worse than the MS-Office file format? Clearly it doesn't; it only means that accessibility is taken very seriously in ODF. To make an accessibility comparison of the two file formats, you need to undertake an independent review of ODF and the Microsoft Office file formats for accessibility, and see how they both fare. And it turns out, someone has already done that!

Dr. Cheiko Asakawa and and Rich Schwerdtfeger of IBM did a careful and thorough analysis of ODF and Microsoft Office file format accessibility. They found that Microsoft Office's file format failed to provide for relative font sizes, failed to encode table headers and logical tab orders in documents, and failed to provide label association for forms. Furthermore, outside of the accessibility context, the Microsoft Office file format provides no way to encode image maps (with or without appropriate ALT tags), or 3D shapes (both of which ODF provides for). Their analysis also found accessibility issues with ODF, all of which have been addressed in the ODF 1.1 proposal submitted to the ODF Technical Committee. So as I noted in late May, with these incorporated into ODF 1.1 later this year, ODF will be the most accessible document file format, bar none.

So, I guess in a way Microsoft was correct when they said in their press release "certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats." At least when it applies to accessibility and ODF 1.1 later this year, exporting an ODF 1.1 file to Microsoft Office file format will mean a loss of some accessibility information, because there is simply no way to express that information in the Microsoft Office file format... (2006-07-11 13:38:32.0) Permalink