[libreoffice-accessibility] Laws and standards (Re: accessibility mailing list)

(This e-mail didn't get through the first time 
because I put discuss@documentfoundation.org in CC.)

At 07:41 2/12/2010, Marc Paré wrote:
> Le 2010-11-29 09:23, Christophe Strobbe a écrit :
> > Hi Florian,
> >
> > At 12:01 28/11/2010, Florian Effenberger wrote:
> >> on yesterday's LinuxDay in Austria, the request for a separate
> >> accessibility mailing list came up. (...)
> > (...)
>
> This seems like quite an important developer 
> detail to work out right from the very start. 
> Are the developers aware of accessibility 
> concerns? Also from a marketing point of view, 
> if we are to market the suite to governmental 
> agencies subscribing to accessibility rules in 
> their procurement of software applications, then 
> we should  be discussing this sooner than later.

I don't know to what extent the LibreOffice 
developers are aware of accessibility.
As far as I understand, LibreOffice accessibility 
doesn't start from scratch. See 
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Accessibility>.
However, the problem with using the Java 
Accessibility API on Windows is that screen 
readers don't support it very well. NVDA and 
Window-Eyes are said to provide better support 
than JAWS (which many consider to be the dominant 
screen reader in the English-speaking world), but 
even access with NVDA is not considered 
excellent. The OpenOffice.org accessibility page 
mentions plans to implement the IAccessible2 API, 
but I don't know if the project ever got started on this.
Access to OpenOffice.org (I don't know if 
LibreOffice has changed the UI) with VoiceOver on 
Mac OS and with Orca on GNOME seems to work better.

Of course, there is more to accessibility than 
screen reader access; two other important issues 
are support for desktop themes (high contrast, 
large font size, ...), and keyboard access (also relevant to sighted users).


> (...) We could also get links to any 
> governmental rules/laws relating to this for reference. (...)

In the US, Section 508 is being updated; see 
<http://508-255-refresh.trace.wisc.edu/content/home>.
In the EU, I know about laws and regulations 
related to Web accessibility, but not about laws 
and regulations for software accessibility in 
general. In some EU countries, the only relevant 
legislation is the general anti-discrimination 
legislation, which is probably not something you 
can refer to in procurement. We will have to wait 
a few more years for a European standard that 
defines accessibility requirements for ICT that 
can be used in public procurement. (A call for 
experts for a committee to write that standard 
went out quite recently; see <ftp://ftp.cen.eu/PUB/Calls/M376.pdf>.)

If you want references to standards on software 
accessibility, I can give you these:
* ISO 9241-171:2008 (not available for free; see 
<http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=39080>);
* ISO/IEC TR 29318 (3 parts): freely downloadable 
at <http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html>.
* the W3C's Authoring Tool Accessibility 
Guidelines 2.0 (under development) focus on 
authoring tools for Web content, but many 
criteria can be generalised to authoring tools in 
general (I have this in another mail if you want 
it): <http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/>.

The accessibility of the ODF format itself was 
taken in hands when the state of Massachusetts 
announced a move to the OpenDocument Format; see 
for example Peter Korn's long blog post about 
this at 
<http://blogs.sun.com/korn/entry/massachusetts_open_document_and_accessibility> 
and the OpenDocument Accessibility Guidelines by 
the ODF Accessibilit SC 
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office-accessibility>.

We really need a wikipage for this, don't we?

Best regards,

Christophe




--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
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BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
Twitter: @RabelaisA11y
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