Open Doc Format and the accessibility gap

JanC wrote:
> How bad is accessibility in OOo & Firefox?
I would encourage you to try the HandsFree exercises to find out for 
yourself :) https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HandsFreeEmailing

AFAIU, it depends to some extent on your environment because things like 
screen readers need to interact on a low level with both the OS and the 
application.

The JAWS screenreader website says: "Enhanced support has been added for 
today’s most popular applications, including Microsoft Office XP." I'm 
not visually impaired myself, so I haven't used these tools and don't 
know the details of what that means, but I would assume it means that 
the screenreader is clever about what it reads out, like just the text 
or just the navigation menus, depending on what the user wants.

With OpenOffice, much of the accessibility information goes through a 
Java bridge AFAIK (yay Sun!), which might work well on Windows with Java 
installed (though possibly less polished than with MS-Office). On Ubuntu 
we have Java issues in addition of course.

Some people report that they can get Firefox to read pages to them, 
others not. It certainly doesn't 'just work'. I've actually not gotten 
Gnopernicus to work in screenreader mode on my system at all yet :(

I believe many visually impaired users work mostly on the command line, 
where braille tools and test-to-speech works quite well (and the Linux 
CLI + tools is much much better than Win/DOS). But they then get 
problems with standard file formats. How do you read a .doc or an .odt 
from the CLI? (there are conversion tools, but how good are these?)

For some other groups you can get a lot of mileage out of good general 
usability like making sure that all the functions can be performed with 
the keyboard. Little things like StickyKeys at the GDM and the raw CLI 
would be nice.

- Henrik