Re: accessibility of abw format
[email protected] Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:01:57 -0500
| Newsgroups | gmane.editors.abiword.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
hello, I am willing to write manua for authors. But, I am not developer so I cannot be of much help in more technical aspects. Indeed, I am willing to help as much as I can in testing developers' efforts to improve accessibility. Thanks, Vedran Quoting Alan Horkan <[email protected]>: > > > 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. > ----------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to > [email protected] with the word > unsubscribe in the message body. > ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.