Re: accessibility of abw format

On Mon, 8 Aug 2011 [email protected] wrote:

> Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2011 02:04:43 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> To: Alan Horkan <[email protected]>
> Cc: Abiword is Awesome <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: accessibility of abw format
>
> Hello,
>
> Yes, as far as the file format is concerned is concerned the question
> should be as you stated: "How can the metadata and structural markup
> in Abiword be improved to better support accessibility needs?"
> Indeed, I think that we can learn  a lot from analysis of
> accessibility of OpenOffice and .dot format by Peter Korn who worked
> in Sun Microsystems currently in Oracle.
> http://blogs.oracle.com/korn/

I did a bit more reading

More specifically here is one of his posts discussing accessibility
evaluation of OpenDocument:
http://blogs.oracle.com/korn/date/20060526
which points to the set of recommendations:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200605/msg00107.html

> In addition, it may be worth to develop plugins which may produce
> output in Braille, DAISY or .epub formats.

Abiword has some support for ePub.

DAISY ebooks seem to be a mix of seems to be a mix XHTML and SMIL only
a bit different from other formats Abiword supports
http://www.daisy.org/
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/daisy/Z39-86-2005.html

> I am willing to help in testing accessibility with my friends who are
> disabled persons.

I turned up some other documents, they basically advise authors on best
practice such as providing alternative text and descriptions for graphics,
using table headers, avoiding nested tables, only using colour as a
secondary indicator, encouraging them to make proper use of styles rather
than manually applying bold, italics, and other decorations, and so on.

The technical recommendations from OASIS examine first of all that these
features exist in the file format, and that they are preserved when
exporting to other formats such as tagged PDF, or DAISY (digital talking
book format).

A good plan might be to read those documents and seeing how abiword
compares, as well as writing a brief authors guide. If you are a developer
you might take steps to improve the file exporters to ensure such
accessibility information is preserved information is preserved. Even if
you are not a developer yourself a detailed enough evaluation might be
useful to encourage a developer.

Best of luck.

Regards

Alan H.
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