[Athen] Accessible Office Export Plug-In That's NOT UIUC

Jon Gunderson jongund at uiuc.edu
Sat Feb 10 08:20:58 PST 2007


Cassandra,

I would be happy to provide you with references to organizations who are using the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office. It is not perfect tool, but it can help make creating accessible html versions of office document much easier. If more people purchase the UIUC Wizard or other tools like LecShare the more features these tools will be able to offer to make Microsoft Office content accessible to people with disabilities. We would be happy to talk to you about your needs and if the Wizard would be helpful in fulfilling your accessibility goals.

http://www.accessiblewizards.uiuc.edu

Just a note about where wizard revenue goes: 85% of the money from Wizard revenue goes directly to improvements in the Wizard and the other 15% goes back to support the university. Remember the university pays for our utilities and facilities we work in and the business operations that pay us and collect payments. The university does not make a profit on the sales of the software and is currently supplementing the development costs of the Wizard.

Comments on Open Source:

Our colleague from Oklahoma State apparently believes that any software that is open source automatically has a stable of programmers waiting to develop it, enhance it and support it. Very few open source projects receive very much attention, just look at the number of inactive projects in SourceForge. Working in the Office environment is very difficult and often frustrating from a development perspective. So if the disability community feels that Office needs tools to make it more accessible I urge people to invest in products like LecShare and the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard to create a market for the tools or actively lobby Microsoft to include them. If I felt an open source model would lead to future enhancements of the UIUC Wizard I would do it. But if we made it open source the University of Illinois would probably stop its development due to lack of resources.

For those people who are interested in free things we do have two other free tools and services from UIUC:

Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension
http://firefox.cita.uiuc.edu

Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator
http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu

Visual Impairment Simulator for Windows
http://vis.cita.uiuc.edu

P.S. I am interested learning more about the free open source software accessibility tools available from Oklahoma State.


Jon Gunderson, Ph.D.
Director of IT Accessibility Services
Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES)
and
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES)

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248
Cell: (217) 714-6313

E-mail: jongund at uiuc.edu

WWW: http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/
WWW: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jongund/www/






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