Accessibility development magic at LUG Radio Live

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

I just want to share one of those magic moments you get in open source 
development sometimes, this time at Lug Radio Live. It can happen when 
you get to meet key developers in person early in their development 
process and are able to show them a real use case.

I went to a talk where Daniel Carrera presented the new ODF document 
reader he is working on. The idea is to have a small application that 
can be used to view ODF files (.odt to start with) without having to 
download OpenOffice, say.

I caught up with him afterwards and asked him if he had considered the 
accessibility functionality of the utility. I explained that many blind 
people prefer to use the command line because the GUI isn't really 
efficient for them even though there are some tools available. One 
problem with working on the command line though is the lack of tools for 
accessing documents normally used in the GUI such as OpenOffice docs and 
PDFs.

We quickly worked out that it would be quite easy to just output the 
content as HTML and 'render' it in a text-based browser like lynx. 
Daniel went home the same day and rolled out a prototype. He posted [1] 
to the ubuntu-accessibility list where Luke had the good idea of using 
elinks instead which has even better access features.

Daniel followed the advice, making a new version and finally rolling a 
.deb [2] for it. After a bit more testing by the access team he'll post 
it to REVU. So we should soon have command line support for ODF files 
installable from Universe. Cool!

[1] 
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-accessibility/2006-July/000646.html
[2] http://trac.opendocumentfellowship.org/odf2html/wiki/odfreader

- Henrik