Since my PC got infected in June and with all of the other things going 
on in my life it's been a few months since I've used LibreOffice. 
Version 5.0 is now out and I am hoping, with all of the changes they've 
made, that accessibility is still good. Version 4 worked pretty well 
with NVDA and with JAWS. If I'm going to be honest, Microsoft Office 
provides richer accessibility and, when possible, I still recommend 
Microsoft Office for blind screen reader users who are required to 
complete major writing projects and who require the most information 
they can get while editing their documents. Office 365 can be purchased 
for a relatively small annual fee, $69.00 or maybe less, depending on 
where you can acquire it or you can get it for around $8.00 a month. 
Having said that, LibreOffice is free and provides a decent enough level 
of accessibility to accomplish many document editing tasks and it may be 
worth considering or at least trying out for people who don't have 
Microsoft's suite. www.libreoffice.org is the Web site for more 
information or to download a completely free copy. Here's the press 
release for the new version.



LibreOffice 5.0 stands out from the office suite crowd
Windows 10 compatibility and superior interoperability features
Immediately available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows
libreofficsplash
Berlin, August 5, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 
5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project and the 
first of the third development cycle. LibreOffice is a full feature open 
source office suite which compares head to head with every product in 
the same category, while it stands out for superior interoperability 
features.
LibreOffice 5.0 builds on the success of the 4.x family, which has been 
deployed by over 80 million users (source: TDF estimate, based on users 
pinging for updates), including large organizations in Europe and South 
America.
LibreOffice 5.0 sports a significantly improved user interface, with a 
better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, 
it offers better interoperability with office suites such as Microsoft 
Office and Apple iWork, thanks to new and improved filters to handle non 
standard formats. Other improvements have been added to every module of 
the suite, and Windows 64bit builds (Vista and later) have been added.
LibreOffice 5.0 Highlights
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A new version for new endeavours: LibreOffice 5.0 is the cornerstone of 
the mobile clients on Android and Ubuntu Touch, as well as the upcoming 
cloud version. As such, LibreOffice 5.0 serves as the foundation of 
current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and 
collaborate!
A beautiful office suite designed by a fantastic community: With new 
icons and major improvements to menus and sidebar, LibreOffice looks 
nicer and helps users in being creative and getting things done the 
right way. In addition, style management is now more intuitive thanks to 
the visual preview of styles right in the interface.
Spreadsheets that rock: LibreOffice 5.0 ships with an impressive number 
of new and enhanced spreadsheet features: complex formulae, new 
functions, conditional formatting, image cropping, table addressing and 
much more. Calc’s blend of performance and features makes it an 
enterprise-ready, heavy duty spreadsheet capable of handling all kinds 
of workload for an impressive range of use cases.
Better filters for better documents: LibreOffice 5 ships with many 
improvements to document import and export filters, for an enhanced 
document conversion fidelity all around. In addition, it is now possible 
to timestamp PDF files generated with LibreOffice.
A complete list of the most significant new features is available on the 
accompanying press release, and has also been published on the website 
at the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.
LibreOffice 5.0 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the 
precious work of hundreds of volunteers. According to Coverity Scan, the 
number of defects for 1,000 lines of code is now consistently below 
0,001. This translates into an open source office suite which is not 
only easier to develop but it’s also easier to maintain and debug. In 
fact, the amount of solved bugs is now over 25,000, and is increasing 
rapidly.
Last, but not least, LibreOffice 5.0 has been improved in terms of 
quality and stability thanks to a large number of tests performed on new 
builds by going through thousands of documents to spot crashers, bugs 
and regressions.
“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made 
cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the 
office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” says Michael Meeks, 
a Director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we 
have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to 
clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more 
responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of 
user interface.”
A summary of what has happened “under the hood” of LibreOffice 5.0 is 
available here: 
http://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/under-the-hood-5-0.html.
“LibreOffice 5.0 is such a good product that people used to legacy open 
source office suites feel overwhelmed by the amount of new features and 
improvements,” adds Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman and leading 
LibreOffice developer. “Switching from any OOo derivative to LibreOffice 
is a giant leap into the future of free office suites.”
Availability and enterprise deployments
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LibreOffice 5.0 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for 
open source office suites, and as such is targeted to technology 
enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.
For enterprise class deployments in organizations of any size, TDF 
maintains the more mature 4.4.x branch (now at 4.4.5). In any case, TDF 
suggests to deploy or migrate to LibreOffice only if the project is 
backed by certified professionals providing Level 3 support, migration 
consultancy or training courses according to recognized best practices 
(http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
LibreOffice 5.0 is immediately available from the following link: 
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software 
advocates and all community members can support The Document Foundation 
with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.
by Italo Vignoli at August 05, 2015 10:02 AM

-- 
David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist

Feel free to visit my Web site
www.davidgoldfield.info


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