ODF 1.2 rev. 4 review

[Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>]

Accessibility Review of ODF 1.2:

In general there is not a lot of new meat here. The working group has done a lot of editorial cleanup and the document is more readable. Based on what we have this is my assessment:

Section 2.4.2 contains settings which can be applied to the document. Are there any settings we might want to persist which are not already provided?

For example: Might want to include a cursor preference?

Section 2.5 refers to Scipts with DOM access. ... Will they be used to create application style look and feels? Also, the <office:event-listeners> elements don't have names. These could be attached to actions.

Section 3.13.2 referes to a Reload Delay. This potentially could be a problem if 1.2 pushes to be more dynamic. We should discuss minimum delay times per 508 or WCAG 2.

I took a look at custom meta information. Essentially it can contain anything and the ODF 1.2 user agent is simply required to preserve it. So, I don't see this as an accessibility issue where we could provide definitive accessibility requirements.

Section 4.1.1.4 indicates that ODF 1.2 allows the author to suppress heading numbers from the document. I don't know that this is an issue as long as document structure is preserved and we have access to the heading level.

Section 4.6 identifies change tracking elements. This seems cleaner than 1.1. This will mean changes for how we deriver accessibility support for changed areas. The end result will be the same. The change properties should be made available via text properties, along with font information, etc. We have elements for insert, delete, change, format change, etc.

Section 6.7 Common field attributes: Although not new we may want to tell office applications to provide the field attribute types to the AT. We provide this information in ARIA whereas we can tell the AT is the value is a specific date format, integer, etc.

Section 7.9 Bibliography - should we define platform api roles for things like this to get at these document landmarks quickly?

Section 8.2.6. The new subtable text has not been added.

Beyond this, we should look at adding embedded row and column headers similar to html (per groups discussion). We should see if they are going to focus on dynamic document applications. We should find out when they are going to include tables in presentations. ... nothing yet.


Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer