RE: [office-accessibility] Accessibility Evaluation of the OpenDocument v1.0 specification

["Mary McRae" <marypmcrae@gmail.com>]

To Nathaniel and the Accessibility SC members:

Congratulations! We all realize how important this work is, and how often it's
an afterthought, if thought of at all. On behalf of OASIS Staff I just wanted to
pass along our appreciation for your commitment to this effort. I'm thrilled to
hear that you're planning to continue the work, and if ever there's anything I
can do to be of assistance, please feel free to let me know!

Regards,

Mary

---------------------------------------------------
Mary P McRae
OASIS 
Manager of TC Administration
email: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org  
web: www.oasis-open.org 
phone: 603.232.9090



 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter.Korn@Sun.COM [mailto:Peter.Korn@Sun.COM] 
> Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 8:19 PM
> To: OpenDocument Mailing List
> Cc: office-accessibility@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [office-accessibility] Accessibility Evaluation of 
> the OpenDocument v1.0 specification
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> As set forth in the Statement of purpose of the Accessibility 
> Subcommittee of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, the 
> Accessibility Subcommittee submits their report of the 
> outcome of their accessibility evaluation of the OpenDocument 
> v1.0 specification.  Our report is attached, in ODF, PDF, and 
> XHTML formats.
> 
> Here is our Executive Summary:
> 
>   The ODF Accessibility Subcommittee has identified 9
>   accessibility issues in ODF 1.0, and proposes candidate
>   solutions to them. With these changes, we believe that ODF
>   will meet or exceed the accessibility support provided in
>   all other office file formats as well as that specified in
>   the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
> 
>   Furthermore, these modifications will enable ODF to support
>   the authoring of DAISY digital talking books, a worldwide
>   standard used by blind, low vision, learning disabled, and
>   other print impaired communities.
> 
>   The recommended changes address:
> 
>     * Alternative text for non-text objects (3 recommendations)
>     * Proper association of captions to captioned content
>     * Encoding of pagination information
>     * Preservation of table semantic structure imported from
>       other file formats
>     * Proper encoding of authored table header content
>     * Author-defined logical navigation of page objects in
>       presentations
>     * Provision of alternative text hints for hyperlinks
> 
>   Furthermore, we request that the appropriate text be added to
>   the ODF specification to indicate how this accessibility meta
>   data is mapped by the authoring tool to a platform accessibility
>   API as well as their accessibility applicability in the
>   specification.
> 
>   To fully address the needs of people with disabilities in using
>   ODF, an ODF application must meet a number of accessibility
>   requirements as well.  ODF application developers should be
>   provided with implementation guidelines to meet these
>   requirements.
> 
> 
> It is the intention of this subcommittee to continue working, 
> now with our focus on the new goal of defining and delivering 
> improvements to the efficiency and usability of ODF by people 
> with disabilities that goes beyond the current state of the 
> art.  These improvements include: 
> effective blind access to slide presentations; partnering 
> with the W3C to tackle SVG graphics accessibility; better 
> access to graphs and charts; and improved navigation models 
> for tabular data.  We look forward to delivering to the 
> technical committee our thoughts and recommendations in these 
> areas for consideration in future versions of the ODF specification.
> 
> 
> 
> On behalf of the OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee,
> 
> 
> Peter Korn
> Accessibility Architect,
> Sun Microsystems, Inc.
> 
>