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Le 2010-12-02 11:27, Christophe Strobbe a écrit :
(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
Hi Christophe:

Thanks for the great information. Yes there is need for a wiki on this.

Re: windows and java, there was some talk of trying to move the suite away from java dependency. I don't know how much this would affect AT on LibreOffice.
Marc

--
Marc Paré
http://www.parEntreprise.com


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