Re: accessibility of abw format

On 8/8/2011 8:20 AM, Alan Horkan wrote:
>
> 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.

accessibility is not just for the blind. I use speech recognition because my 
hands don't work. There are hundreds of thousands of us and there is very little 
to nonexistent support for people with opportunity disabilities. Unfortunately, 
nuance, while they tout accessibility, isn't really interested in anything more 
than accidental accessibility.

I think there is some other solutions we can use for accessibility that are 
significantly different from the current model as touted by various 
accessibility groups.  the main difference is that instead of trying to leverage 
what's available through the GUI which loses all the necessary information for a 
good speech interface, that a separate API is needed to expose the internals are 
the application so that any user interface be it text-to-speech, speech 
recognition, or GUI can be built on top of it to provide the API the user needs.

the current model has 15+ years of failure to keep up. I have lost accessibility 
year after year and I'm tired of it. It's time for new solution.

--- eric
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