Mr. James Vaglia wrote: > What is being done to ensure useability with assistive technology such as:
a) The major issue with OOo is whether or not an individual's a11y tools of choice recognize the Java a11y API, or not. The second issue is that most, if not of the icons used within OOo are not labelled. Something that is relatively trivial to fix, but requires a huge investment in time. The third issue is that some idiot decided that the best way to design the User Interface, was to ensure that the screen windows can't be reached by keystrokes.b Fixing this flaw is a little more complicated. [The easiest way to fix it is to do a complete rewrite of the User Interface, and the way it interacts with the program.] The fourth issue is that the Stylist wasn't designed for, and can not correctly handle a11y writing systems. There are three possible fixes: * Completely rewriting the way that Stylist handles languages and writing systems. Specifically, making locale, language, and writing system three different attributes of styles.[This solution potentially solves a myriad other minor issues. The downside is that it ends up with roughly 10^8 combinations. Something that can be awkward to keep track of manually.] b) Project Missouri probably will result in an Office Suite written from the ground up for users with a11y requirements. > www.gwmicro.com, www.freedomscientific.com, Both JAWS and Windows-Eyes can work with _some_ parts of OOo. When those programs will work with all parts of OOo depends upon how soon gwmicro and freedom scientific decide to support the JAVA a11y API. [In the case of Freedom Scientific, my guess it that will occur roughly one month after Microsoft files Chapter #7.] > making Open Office speak menues, dialogs, icons and documents on the Mac Making OOo self-voicing will add a considerable degree of complexity to it, for very little gain. It would be much more effective use of resources to simply use a screen reader, or speech to text translators. If you want OOo to output a document as an Ogg file, or any other sound format, that is doable.[IIRC, there are two or three FLOSS projects that can read a text file, to output either WAV or MP3 files. That code can probably be rewritten for Ogg output, and then massaged into OOo. The first couple of versions could be as an add an extension.] I _think_ all the dialogues are covered, if a screen reader utilizes the Java a11y API. I need to play with Orca, Dasher, and my joystick some more, to find out what fails, and what doesn't fail in OOo 2.2 on Linux. > or to be made to work with VoiceOver? Assuming VoiceOver makes use of the Java a11y API, then it will work with OOo. This really is a question that should be aimed at Apple, not OOo. xan jonathon --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
