Open Doc Format and the accessibility gap

On 11/3/05, Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Andy Updegrove writes in his standards blog about how the efforts to
> move Massachusetts local government onto the Open Document Format may be
> derailed by the lack of accessibility support in OpenOffice. Many of the
> Windows based accessibility tools such as JAWS and Dragon Naturally
> Speaking work better with MS-Office. This is partly because it's the
> dominant Office suite, but it is also true that accessibility support in
> many of 'our' applications like OpenOffice and Firefox is lacking. This
> will continue to be a problem when trying to introduce FOSS into local
> and national government because the helpful MS-lobbyists will always be
> on hand to point out the accessibility gap (and cite Sect. 508) and the
> decision makes have no choice but to take that very seriously.

How bad is accessibility in OOo & Firefox?

This _is_ important, not because we could miss government contracts,
but because everybody should be able to use Ubuntu.
OTOH, I know only 2 blind computer users, and both use linux with
console applications and a "braille rule" (is that a correct
translation?).


--
JanC