Saturday December 03, 2005 Accessibility for OpenDocument
I note over at the OpenDocument Technical Committee that they have formed an accessibility sub-committee, as agreed at the Summit we all attended in Armonk a few weeks ago. According to the announcement, its purpose is:
- To liaise with the disability community to gather accessibility related feedback on the OpenDocument v1.0 specification.
- To gather accessibility related feedback from implementors of accessible applications that implement OpenDocument v1.0.
- To produce a formal accessibility evaluation of the OpenDocument v1.0 file format.
A great move. It's high time that the disability community was able to escape the grip of the proprietary and the cynically abusive way that the businesses involved use the trapped investment of that community for political leverage and distorted profit. Let's hope the way ODF has raised the profile of the matter accelerates that escape.
Back to BlogEd
My colleague Henry Story has been quietly and faithfully labouring away to create a top-class blog editor for us all to use on blogs.sun.com and he's pretty close to paydirt now. He's waiting for the Atom 1.0 specification to be complete before he really declares victory, but as it stands BlogEd is a pretty cool tool anyway. I used it for a while back when there was just James Gosling working on it, and gave up because it wasn't flexible enough - it old allowed simple page builds pushed to a server with FTP back then.
Today, BlogEd offers support for the MetaWeblog API in its Roller, Blosjom and Moveable Type flavours, there's full WYSIWYG editing as well as raw HTML editing for HTML hackers like me, there's multi-blog support so I can look after several blogs (all mine get aggregated at The Mink Dimension), and best of all it's a Java application so it works everywhere I do. You can give it a try right now if you want as there is a WebStart variant - there's even a Mac OS X native version for smart people with Macs!
So I'm giving it a try again. It just happily downloaded my entire blogging history from blogs.sun.com, and I'm now trying a new entry to see what it looks like. Maybe I'll be able to edit offline at last, David!
Best part though is it is all open source, licensed under BSD. The configurability, the platform independence, the ability to launch from the web yet use offline, all suggest BlogEd could have a bright future as an embedded part of online tools. Give it a try, and maybe join in with its community.
