MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice

kcurtis writes "According to a boston.com article, senators in Massachetts are questioning the move to OpenDocument." From the article: "At issue is how the state government stores the millions of digital documents and other public records it creates. The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages -- except Microsoft Office. The state Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee is holding a hearing Monday on the proposed document storage standards after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns."

Comments

Microsoft supports disabled people better, period

[Antiocheian]

OO.o does have accessibility support, even if it's not as good as what Office has. Previous versions of Office (97 and the like) have worse accessibility, so if they were good enough for workers then OO.o should be too

Ah, I see: x > 0, z > x, z > y, y > 0, therefore x should be "good enough" since y was good enough.

The argument is fallacious and shows total (or intended) ignorance of figures. Openoffice does have some accessibility support which however is almost not insignificant when compared even to Microsoft Office 95. You see, Microsoft has invested real money to support those people.

especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o

That would be great. Microsoft, however, calls this funding "payment", charges it to end users only and not on the general public and has come up with a better product 10 years ago.