Steve,

Accessibility of OpenDocument has been a hot topic in the last six months, 
when the Chief Information Officer for the State of Massachusetts, Peter 
Quinn, proposed converting all state documents to the format starting in 
January, 2007.  Curtis Chong of the National Federation of the Blind led the 
charge in raising voices regarding the state's policy.  The NFB serves as a 
paid consultant to Microsoft, which would be most negatively impacted by the 
change.  peter Quinn eventually backed off his position that blind employees 
and citizens must use a format they can't access as easily as MS Word. 
Quinn at first claimed that Linux and OpenOffice were accessible options but 
backed off when Sun and IBM acknowledged that they weren't as accessible and 
usable to the blind as Windows and MS Word.  The Massachusetts state 
legislature also conducted hearings on the issue.

the New York times paper in Boston, the Boston Globe, conducted an 
investigation that showed that peter Quinn accepted travel, accommodations, 
free conference passes, and speaking fees from companies that sold 
OpenOffice products and who were also vendors to the state.

He eventually resigned, although the policy is still in place.  in the wake 
of the accessibility concerns raised, the OpenOffice folks created an 
accessibility committee, which as of the end of last year has not met.

Kelly



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Hoad" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 5:49 AM
Subject: [VICUG-L] Accessibility---Threat or Opportunity?


> 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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> 


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html