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."

Comments

It's a file format.

[mypalmike]

It's like saying jpeg isn't accessible. If this guy feels "screwed again", he should do something about it. And I mean write some software, not complain and lobby.

"Disabled Activists" = Corporate Activists

[RexRhino]

Lets face it, only a huge corporation can afford the vast amounts of capital and manpower in order to make sure all their products work flawlessly for disabled people.

The so-called activists for the disabled, who push for laws that make "disabled access" manditory, are funded by companies that charge a lot of money to provide those kinds of services, or large corporations like Microsoft who see it as a way to harm competition, or contractors who can charge lots of money adding elevators and such into buildings.

These laws and regulations have nothing to do with helping the disabled, because everyone knows that it would cost way less money to provide everyone in a wheelchair with one that can climb stairs for free, than it would cost to put an elevator in every place of buisness. It would be way cheaper and easier to develop a screen reader or similiar technology that can read all websites and documents properly, regardless of their design, than to develop every website, product, or document to work with a screen reader.

These kind of "activism" against the OpenDocument format is about driving out of buisness small companies, free software, and those that compete with a handful of big corporations.

Re:They can always use word.

[swillden]

And, who knows, maybe Microsoft will rise to the challenge and beat the competition out by producing a superior product that is worth paying for even in a market that's been leveled by OpenDocument?

All they'd need to do is add an OpenDocument saver and loader.

It would take more than that to make Office worth paying for. Well, Word, anyway. PowerPoint and Excel are okay. Word's a buggy, hard-to-use piece of crap.