Re: accessibility of abw format

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 <horkana@maths.tcd.ie>:

>
>
> On Mon, 8 Aug 2011 vedran.vucic@gnulinuxcentar.org wrote:
>
>> Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2011 02:04:43 -0500
>> From: vedran.vucic@gnulinuxcentar.org
>> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@maths.tcd.ie>
>> Cc: Abiword is Awesome <abiword-user@abisource.com>
>> 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.
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Received on Tue Aug 9 02:02:04 2011