Re: [office-accessibility] Writer table example

[Nathaniel S Borenstein <nborenst@us.ibm.com>]

Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS wrote on 02/20/2006
01:19:18 PM:

> The net of this is why must we use SVG as the only drawing mechanism
in a 
> presentation. 

There's no doubt that it's nearly always preferable,
in a standard specification, to specify one and only one way of doing most
things.  Unfortunately, it's also nearly always impossible.  For
an incredible variety of reasons, you nearly always end up having to support
more than one of <<<nearly any example worth discussing>>>.

I'm not saying this might not be a delightful place
for an exception to that rule, but I am skeptical that we can count on
such luck.  But neither do we have to worry much about it now.  If
multiple alternatives emerge, probably for reasons not currently on our
radar, we'll deal with it at the time, as we're unlikely to be able to
do anything now to prevent it.  

<soapbox>This is yet another reason why we need
to view this sub-committee as more than a short term exercise, and also
to try to take matters one intelligently-sized step at a time.  If
ODF is successful, it will continue to evolve for years, and new opportunities
for accessibility problems will, alas, keep cropping up.  We just
have to be smart about solving problems in the right order, and try to
make sure we're here for the long term.</soapbox>

> - Nathaniel, we need to determine from the TC
whether there is a reason 
> that tables were not used in presentations as opposed to SVG. We need
to 
> also know if this is a hard requirement for the ODF Spec. Note: switching
> to real ODF tables could be a big hit to 

Rich, I think some cut and paste error lost the end
to the above sentence.  This tipped my tenuous understanding of the
details of this question teetering over the brink into embarrassed confusion.
 Trust me, you don't want me trying to explain this question to the
TC on your behalf.  Could you please send me a set of questions in
exactly the form that you'd like me to pass on to the TC? (For that matter,
you could join the TC mailing list and ask yourself, whichever you prefer.)
 -- Nathaniel