You have done the blind a great disservice here..
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 12:48:50PM -0800, D. Cooper Stevenson wrote:
[..]
> Jesse in Sen. Pacheco's office indicated that the Senator had two
> primary issues with the new standards announcement:
>
> 1) Disabled Access to Open Document Format
[..]
> For the first, I relayed to Jesse that a) Disabled Access was a function
> primarily of the application rendering the document, not the document
> format itself. I let him know that the disability group should should be
> upset with the Office product for not supporting the Open Document
> Format, not ODF itself.
OpenDocument supports graphics and forms.. I can hear it now:
"Image. Image. Text entry. Image button."
You don't think so? That's what my screen reader gets from lynx out of a
web page I'm looking at right now. So how does an application deal with
that? Does OpenDocument have anything like an alt tag for an image? Are
labels for text entries up to the document or a property of the text entry
itself? At least HTML has the former.
Even if these things were provided for, there is still a good chance that
the content of the documents will not be made accessible because frankly
most sighted people don't much think or care about blind people. The
entire Internet exists to prove that.
Open documents indeed!
And with your helpful assurance, the current inaccessible version of
OpenDocument is pushed into state mandates where it takes an Act of God or
an Act of State Government to get a new version of the standard (which
probably won't fix these kinds of problems anyway) to be adopted.
On behalf of the blind, thanks a lot. At least with word documents we had
a chance of sorting these things out if someone bothered to set the
metadata on their images, and form entries just didn't exist.
Yeah, I know, this is open source--if I have a problem with it I need to
go and learn the codebase, figure out how to solve the problem, gather
support within the community for my proposed solution to it, write a
patch. and try to plead my case for it to be incorporated upstream. Then
I can try to get the state to use the new version. As if.
--
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act,
but a habit."
-- Aristotle
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