[odf-discuss] "accessibility" issues in odf adoption; proposed development projects

[Thomas Zander]

On Friday 25 August 2006 22:48, JohnNewell at mac.com wrote:
>         If  "accessibility" issues are so important to odf adoption,
> and if the list of proposed development projects were long enough,
> how far down the list would be the work necessary to accomplish
> accessibility parity with the dominant vendor?  What would be
> ballpark estimates of the time and costs necessary to achieve parity.

For starters, I have no idea how good a11y support is for the upcoming 
Office release. Last I heard MS would not build it themselves, they want 
external companies to provide it. Which leads me to believe the state of 
a11y in MS Office 12 might be near zero for about a year (as long as it 
takes for those external companies to bring out a new version).

Thats a worse case scenario, naturally.

In KOffice2 we have the a11y support high in the priority list. At this 
state of development (where v2 is pretty alpha) we are building in all 
the technologies needed for excellent accessibility. Scripting backends 
and bridges to the relevant a11y backends.

One thing that has to be very clear to everyone which generally is not is 
that because KOffice is open source everyone can add this a11y support in 
a fraction of the time and cost of doing it for, say, MS Office.
I am a core KWord developer and I care for a11y, but I probably won't 
spend weeks and months getting it working to perfection, I have other 
things I like more. But I will work with anyone, or any company that 
wants to do the hard work and I'll even maintain the codebase afterwards 
whenever there are changes in the core.

So, the assumption that I see being made a lot (I'm not saying you did, 
naturally :) is that the creators of the software themselves need to add 
accessibility support. This is only true for proprietary and closed 
source systems. Mass. can hire a couple of programmers to add this 
functionality to KOffice for a fraction of fitting one department with 
MSOffice + accessibility software, but they can reuse that tech for all 
their workers.

So, IMO what various governments or companies that care about 
accessibility should do is to create a 'pot of money' to get a company or 
professional to create the technology as GPL software. I'm pretty sure 
the cost per government is minimal like that.
Obviously I think that the best target is KOffice due to its small 
codebase and excellent foundation (Qt4).

Cheers!
-- 
Thomas Zander
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