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:
web: www.oasis-open.org
phone: 603.232.9090
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [mailto:]
> Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 8:19 PM
> To: OpenDocument Mailing List
> Cc:
> 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.
>
>
