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OpenDocument Plans Questioned by Disabled
ComputerWorld is reporting that John Winske, president of the Disability Policy Consortium, is raising some questions about the accessibility of the OpenDocument format. From the article: "Winske, who has muscular dystrophy, said he instantly remembered how Microsoft had to be "prodded and dragged, kicking and screaming" to make its software accessible during the transition from DOS to Windows. None of the prominent desktop applications that can create and save documents in OpenDocument currently work well with screen readers, magnifiers and other assistive technologies -- at least at a level comparable to that of products from Microsoft, whose 40-person Accessibility Technology Group is now widely praised by disabilities advocates."
1. Wouldn't Microsoft likely implement ODF and then all their amazing accessibility stuff would be right there and ready to go? I always thought of MS as the "make ours able to open their stuff, keep changing our stuff so they can't open it, and make ours the default" crowd.
2. If they don't, I'm all for disabled rights, but there is no damn way that I should be required to pay a company to read public documents so that a blind person can have equal access WHEN THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM IS THE COMPANY'S REFUSAL TO IMPLEMENT AN OPEN STANDARD!!! Talk about rewarding the wrong behaviour.
/. has always been a bit self centered re: open source but you have to have at least a tad of empathy for those of us who CAN'T write code. A recently diagnosed major medical issue left me with a right hand which no longer works, vision which is deteriorating rapidly, and an over-whelming need to research the poor medical advice which led to the mis-diagnosos that could have saved me 4 years of un-necessary pain
and treatment which complicated the issue.
I have bad-mouthed XP since it's inception but have, Now, come to appreciate MS's handicap accessibility options which are allowing me to utilize GOOGLE to do the research necessary to find REAL answers. Even going so far as to have MS read the page to me when I simply can't do it myself
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
That view is frustratingly short-sighted. Microsoft Office is a tool developed for people with no disabilities; accessibility will never be a primary consideration. Using Microsoft Office with a screen reader or a magnifier is at best a crutch.
Much better interaction styles are possible for the disabled. In the past, they haven't been commercially viable because Microsoft Office formats have dominated the market With open document formats, there would finally be new companies entering the market with high quality tools specifically for people with disability.
Let's not even dwell on the fact that the disabled have experienced first hand how frustrating it is to be at the mercy of Microsoft; do you really think that other groups aren't equally frustrated with Microsoft's predominance but lack the lobbying power to get Microsoft to hire a 40 person crew to address their needs? And what happens with the next paradigm shift? GUIs will have transparency, high resolution visualization, and other features, and it will take many years for accessibility tools to catch up--do you want to continue to be at the mercy of a single company to meet your needs in perpetuity?
Adoption of open document formats is a huge win for the disabled, without any downside. You can even continue to use Microsoft Word, since there will be plug-ins. But you may want to work with the OOo people to improve accessibility there. And you will see ODF apps aimed at people with disabilities soon after the format becomes reasonably widely adopted. Please, don't screw this one up, for your own sake and the sake of everybody else.
Actually I knew a blind guy once who programmed just fine, using a Braille terminal and some sort of very basic text editor. Just like any other programmer using a text shell, except the output was through the braille terminal instead of a VDT. IIRC he had some sort of non-QWERTY keyboard also, but I never inquired as to how it worked.
He always maintained that screen-readers were a huge step down, and were being pushed onto sight-impaired people because they were a lot cheaper than full-size (40 or 80 column) Braille terminals.
When you think about it, basically any command-line application is much better suited to use by a sight-imparied person than a GUIed app, because it can be more easily transformed into a serial data stream (which can be read or felt linearly). So really, Linux ought to be the platform of choice for accessibility, since you can use it in so many more ways: if you don't want to use a GUI, no GUI for you. You don't ever have to use a graphical control panel to change a system setting, check email, even search the internet, etc.
(Unless of course people send you raster PDFs as email attachments, but not like a screenreader is really going to help you much with those, either.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."