[Athen] Microsoft Word versus Open Office

Travis Roth travis at travisroth.com
Wed Sep 12 15:21:32 PDT 2007


At present, for Writer, its accessibility under Gnome using Orca provides a
better screen reader experience than trying via Windows.

The IBM initiative will be interesting to watch. It should be noted that
often, even after a complex application such as this has accessibility
support, AT vendors still need to add specific support for their AT product.


-----Original Message-----
From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On
Behalf Of Sean Keegan
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 5:09 PM
To: 'Access Technologists in Higher Education Network'
Subject: Re: [Athen] Microsoft Word versus Open Office


> It's screen reader access, particularly for Writer,

> isn't exactly stellar. At one time, it was absolutely

> out of reach.


I have not seen this yet pop-up on this list yet, but there is some
additional progress that may provide additional support to access in the
Open Office application. The short version is that IBM is contributing code
that is designed to support AT interactions with the Open Document Format.
It will be interesting to see what happens next and how functional the
technology proves to be with mainstream AT.

Article: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/091007-ibm-accessibility.html

I don't see the entire world suddenly moving away from MS Office anytime
soon, but I am all for improving the level of access to applications like
Open Office.

Take care,
Sean



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