OpenDocument Accessibility

From ITCH

Something exciting happened at a recent meeting of many large multinational IT companies. The meeting opened with a plea to 'make the accessibility issue go away'. Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Sun and others met to plan promotion of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as the global standard for office documents. Now a sub-committee will ensure that the standard includes technical features to support assistive technology. The issue was raised by the State of Massachusetts who are using ODF for all documents and are concerned that everyone is able to access them.

Why is an open standard important? Well without a standard for electrical power plugs you might not be able to use a new gadget. If only one company made plugs and kept the details secret, plugs would be expensive and we would have a problem if they stopped making them. As it is plugs conform to an open standard that anyone can follow to make plugs while spending effort on the features that make their particular plugs unique (OK so that's not much with plugs). We get cheap plugs and know that we can plug in almost anything and it will work.

It is the same issue with document formats, as you will know if you have ever been sent an email attachment and you don't have the correct program installed. However when you receive a web page you can access it with any program that follows the W3C open standards, such as a web browser or email program. That assumes that the document correctly follows the standards, but that's another issue and one that is getting a lot of attention from Ability Magazine and others.

OpenDocument means you can freely create, access and share documents without having the 'correct' program, as long as yours follows the standard. You can use Open Source programs like OpenOffice.org or popular proprietary programs like Microsoft Office. Microsoft have stated they will support OpenDocument if there is enough demand, so why not let them have your vote?

Find out more about the meeting and the Open Document Fellowship provide up-to-date information and are are running the Accessibility Project.

Steve Lee