StarOffice/OpenOffice.org accessibility effort (fwd)

[Janina Sajka]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Korn <korn at sun.com>

Greetings,

The Sun Accessibility team is delighted to announce the establishment of
the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project.  This work will also allow Sun to
build accessibility into the StarOffice productivity suite.

OpenOffice.org is the open source community project dedicated to creating
an international office suite that will run on all major platforms. Sun
contributed all of the StarOffice source files to OpenOffice.org on October
13, 2000.  Versions of StarOffice software, beginning with version 6.0
(currently in beta testing), will be built using the OpenOffice.org
sources, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation.  A future
version of the Sun-branded StarOffice application suite will utilize the
accessibility support being developed by the OpenOffice.org Accessibility
Project.

OpenOffice.org is architecting accessibility support by adopting the Java
Accessibility API as the external accessibility interface.  This means that
existing assistive technologies on Microsoft Windows that support the Java
Access Bridge will be able to provide access to future OpenOffice.org
applications.  In addition, any assistive technologies developed for the
GNOME Accessibility Architecture will also be able to provide access to
future OpenOffice.org applications. (Today, development of assistive
technologies for GNOME includes the recently announced Gnopernicus open
source screen reader/magnifier and the open source GOK on-screen
keyboard.)

In addition to adopting the Java Accessibility API as the published
external accessibility interface, the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project
is defining an Accessibility API in UNO, the the OpenOffice.org object
model.  This means that in the future, OpenOffice.org applications could
expose their accessibility information in other forms, in addition to the
Java Accessibility API.

Beyond implementation of the UNO Accessibility API on the individual
user-interface elements of the OpenOffice.org applications, the
OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project is defining the details of the
accessibility interfaces to the documents created and viewed by those
applications.  Providing access to this content -- complex text documents,
spreadsheets, and presentations -- poses some of the greatest accessibility
challenges faced by assistive technologies, making this an important part
of the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project.  And as previously announced,
in addition to developing programmatic interfaces to document
accessibility, the OpenOffice.org project is publishing the XML file
formats of those documents, providing an additional accessibility avenue
for assistive technologies which can then interact with the documents
directly.


For details on the OpenOffice.org accessibility project, please see:

  http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/

For details on the OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API, please see:

  http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/unoapi.html

To view the proposal for presentation document accessibility, please see:

  http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/proposal-impress.html



On behalf of the Sun Microsystems Accessibility team,

Peter Korn
Sun Microsystems
access at sun.com
http://www.sun.com/access

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