Below find an article from the New York Times Friday March 3 online edition.
How will people with visual impairments be represented at this table?

posting from Emma's Family Farm
Windsor Maine;
Steve Hoad

Push to Create Standards for Documents
By
  Steve Lohr
Published: March 3, 2006

With government records, reports and documents increasingly being created 
and stored in digital form, there is a software threat to electronic access 
to
government information and archives. The problem is that public information 
can be locked in proprietary software whose document formats become obsolete
or cannot be read by people using software from another company.

To cope with the problem, 30 companies, trade groups, academic institutions 
and professional organizations are announcing today the formation of the 
OpenDocument
Format Alliance, which will promote the adoption of open technology 
standards by governments.

"The goal is to ensure that the largest number of people possible are able 
to find, retrieve and meaningfully use government information," said Patrice
McDermott, deputy director of government relations for the American Library 
Association, a member of the alliance.

The problem, she said, is bad and getting worse. She noted that the National 
Archives and Records Administration was engaged in a costly project so the
electronic documents it saves from federal agencies can be opened and read.

The alliance supports a particular solution, called the OpenDocument Format, 
for standard office word processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents.
Today, the formats used by most people for creating documents are those in
Microsoft
Office — over 90 percent of the market.

The alliance includes professional groups like the library association and 
universities like the Indian Institute of Technology. Its membership also 
includes
many rivals to Microsoft in the software business, including
I.B.M.
and
Sun Microsystems,
which offer office software that uses the OpenDocument Format.

"This is not a partisan, anti-Microsoft group," said Simon Phipps of Sun 
Microsystems.

But Microsoft supports another open standard for documents, called OpenXML 
Document Format. In Office 2007, which Microsoft will ship in the second 
half
of the year, OpenXML will be the default format for saving documents instead 
of Microsoft's proprietary formats, said Alan Yates of the company's Office
division.

The OpenXML format is supported by
Intel,
Apple,
Toshiba,
BP and the British Library, among others, Mr. Yates said. Microsoft 
submitted OpenXML to Ecma International, a standards body in Geneva, last 
year.
(fair use, teachable moment)


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