On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Marcus (OOo) <marcus.m...@wtnet.de> wrote: > Am 09/27/2011 08:58 PM, schrieb Jean-Philippe MENGUAL: > > Hi Jean-Philippe, > >> As ordinary blind user, I work very much to promote OOo and >> accessibility free software for blind people. The current problem is >> that public administrations, in France, choose OOo, but blind people are > > thanks a lot for your effort to promote OOo. :-) > >> complaining, as they consider it's not perfectly accessible with NVDA >> (Free screen reader for Windows). And migrating to Linux isn't always >> easy in a network (active directory features, ...). >> >> However, IBM Symphony works fine. My problem is that's not a really free >> software. Nethertheless, IBM, according I was told, gave to the Apache >> Foundation Iaccessible2, which is the code which enables Symphony to be >> perfectly accessible with NVDA. > > That's correct. > >> Could someone study Iaccessible2 and integrate it in OOo? It'd be great >> if OOo could be accessible with NVDA in the next stable releases. As no >> developper, I'd appreciate if you could tell me when it's integrated, if >> someone accepts to do it. > > I don't know if it's already completely arrived or if there are still some > things to fix before it can be integrated into the code. However, we are > really working on taking advantage of the IA2 technology. Maybe Rob can say > more about the current status. >
Accessibility is something IBM has taken very seriously with Symphony, as with our other products. We've worked with standards bodies, assistive technology vendors and others to advance the state of accessibility in this area. We'd love to see this same support in OOo and LO and in every other derivative product. That is why we contributed the code to OOo several years ago. Of course, integrating this into the current AOOo (or LO) trunk is non-trivial. IMHO, we're unlikely to integrate IAccessible2 for AOOo 3.4.0. But it is something we should look at for the next major release. As mentioned elsewhere, we have good IAccessible2 support in Symphony today. And we've already announced that we will be contributing the Symphony source code to Apache. Something we'll need to figure out is the least complicated way to merge IAccessible2 support, as well as other desired UI and other enhancements from Symphony, into future Apache releases. Maybe we can consider this to be a "dress rehearsal" for an eventual merge with LibreOffice? Reconciling the Symphony and AOOo codebases will have much of the same technical complications as an eventual merger of the LO fork will have. Not easy. But not impossible either. -Rob > It's very unlikely that it will be part of the first AOO release because of > this and nobody knows the side effects that could occur. So, IMHO expect it > not for the coming release but for the following one. > > HTH > > Marcus >
