Re: accessibility of abw format

Dear Eric,

My comment is below:


Quoting "Eric S. Johansson" <[email protected]>:

>
> 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 agree very much that accessibility is often misunderstood as support  
just to persons who are blind. Indeed, a number of other persons in  
very different conditions including aged persons need accessibility  
support.  Being aged is not disability in narrow terms.  It is natural  
condition as many other things.
I think that understanding of GUI as interface for sighted persons and  
understanding of accessibility as support for "visual interface".
Far more than that I suggest reading the following pages:
http://trace.wisc.edu/world/computer_access/software/
http://oregonstate.edu/accessibility/software.php
http://larswiki.atrc.utoronto.ca/wiki


> 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.

Indeed, the context in which user actually uses software is very much  
important and API is made in a way that interaction with various  
assisstive technologies is provided. Nevertheless, on the user  
interface side it is needed to enable users to customize interface in  
a way that they can use software efficiently.
As far as documents are concerned there are additional requirements  
including "style" features that can help document to be properly  
tagged, structured etc.
I am not accessibility expert from the point of view of the software  
development but I am willing to help in terms of testing software and  
documents and suggest improvements.

vedran


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