Assistive Technology

OpenOffice.org & GNOME

Offerings

Disabilities

Low vision

large (clear) fonts, icons, screen magnifier. In OOo, contrast between {fore|back}-ground enlarged, no distracting images

Learning disabilities

Clear GUI, ease of understanding

Color blindness

Don't use color as the only option to express information

Disabilities II

Blindness

Speech output (synthesis), Braille display

Hard of hearing / Deafness

Visible representation of audio signals

Mobility impairments

On-screen keyboard, speech recognition, sticky keys (for one-handed operation)

OOo's Accessibility Push

General GUI improvements

Be clear where the input focus is

Control via the keyboard is nearly fully supported in OOo (minus dialog boxes control)

Visual enhancements exist, dialogs are clearer and easier to understand

Java Accessibility API or GNOME Accessibility API for Assistive Technology

AT Support

Two-layer architecture

OOo implements a UNO Accessibility API

http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/unoapi.html

Structure & content of the GUI

UAA is bridged to Java/GNOME API's (on Windows/Linux respectively)

Why Java Accessibility API over MSAA?

MSAA only covers user interface objects like menus, JDK1.4 has additional support for documents too

GNOME

Developers have accessibility guidelines from the GAP

GOK – on-screen keyboard

gnopernicus – needs a synthesizer

festival is free; ViaVoice has disappeared

Roadmap

Java Bridge for GNOME, Nautilus, Evolution support, better speech & documentation, content viewers (xpdf)

Authoring

Via OpenOffice.org

Supports XSLT stylesheets

Export to DocBook & XHTML now

DT Book =~ DocBook; so DAISY might be useful!

Requires JRE

Audacity plug for audio?

GNOME offers...

Conglomerate

http://www.conglomerate.org/

Think about an authoring tool? This does straight 100% pure XML output – it has no input plug-in for a document out of the word-processor though.

Links/Resources

http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/

OOo 1.1 Accessibility White Paper:

Malte Timmermann

http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/whitepaper.html

GAP - http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/

http://xml.openoffice.org/

Thank You!

Colin Charles

byte@aeon.com.my

http://www.bytebot.net/

Colin Charles

2003-12-16T07:17:34