Draft suggested outline for the Accessibility Appendix of the ODF 1.1specification

[Peter Korn <Peter.Korn@Sun.COM>]

Greetings,

Building on the good work that Rich started with the points in his draft 
appendix, I've put together an alternate view, more in outline form, for 
us to also make use of in our meeting tomorrow. Below is the text in 
HTML format in the e-mail, and the obligatory ODF file with this is 
attached.

I've tried to organize the material into related sections/themes, and 
also suggest the inclusion of a bunch of introductory/explanatory text.


Peter


-----------------------------


Outline of the draft Accessibility implementation Appendix for the ODF 
1.1. specification document

July 11, 2006


Section I: Background & Overview

    *

      Introduction

    *

      What is Accessibility?

    *

      Importance of the accessibility of the ODF application

    *

      Importance of ensuring authors encode accessibility information
      into documents

    *

      (special commentary on alternate presentations of documents [e.g.
      DAISY]?)


Section II: ODF application accessibility

    *

      <Reference Section 508 1194.21 guidelines>

    *

      Keyboard navigation/mouseless
      Refer to standard keyboard gestures on various desktops
      Must always have visible indication of focus
      Conventions for selection, caret navigation, etc.

    *

      Theme support (including OS fonts & colors)

    *

      Interoperability with AT

    *

      Note: all of this applies to your help system as well!

    *

      Special issues for Web-based ODF applications


Section III: Document content accessibility

    *

      ALT text (in all of the various places they can go)
      Include suggested UI for setting them

    *

      Importance of proper encoding of document structure (headings,
      subheads, etc.)

    *

      Soft page break generation

    *

      Keyboard focus order for object contents (in slides, in graphics)


Section IV: Special issues when converting other formats to ODF

    *

      ALT text preservation (from MS-Office)

    *

      accessibility meta-data [Rich? What exactly do you mean by this?]

    *

      Preservation of structural semantics

          o

            Page breaks,

          o

            Headers

          o

            Heading levels

          o

            Forms elements

          o

            Table and and table structure: ( headers, rows, etc.)


Section V: Special issues for audio-based ODF applications

    *

      Desktop “self-voicing” setting

    *

      Ensure support for volume control [Rich?]

    *

      Ensure support for all speech capabilities of the TTS engine [Rich?]

Draft accessibility appendix to ODF 1.1.odt