Open Document and Accessibility

I have previously posted on the topic of accessibility within Linux - or more accurately Open Source environments. While chatting with Ron Stewart last week at AHG, I mentioned a presentation proposal I submitted for AHEAD 2006 to discuss this very topic. What I said to Ron was that it's only a matter of time before students start showing up on my campus with Linux laptops in need of accessibility. Not surprisingly, Ron told me that his campus is already seeing this. Which, of course, makes the topic even more topical. My goal for next year will be to keep track of open source access issues and boil them down for the AHEAD crowd - basic knowledge for the administrator types. Having the first big fight over this issue happing right in my front yard is an added bonus.

As posted on SlashDot -

The strongest push-back against Massachusetts' effort to institute open, non-proprietary document formats has come from the accessibility community, who claim that Open-Source desktop software lags behind Windows; and thus that a transition to Open Document will amount to discrimination against the blind and those with other disabilities. This is serious stuff. Peter Korn, who's an Accessibility Architect at Sun, has written a massive piece that provides a general introduction to the subject, a discussion of how Open Source is doing on the the accessibility front (things could be worse, but they could be a lot better), and finally, a detailed look at the (interesting) history and (uncertain) future of these issues in Massachusetts. Anyone in Open Source who thinks they can ignore accessibility issues is probably wrong.

However, before reading this lengthy [but excellent] article by Peter Korn, I recommend starting with an equally excellent article posted last week on SearchOpenSource.com. “The real story behind the Massachusetts ODF flap” [by Bernard Golden] truly boils down this multifaceted issue for the masses. For a marketplace association, he reaches back a few years and compares the OpenDocumentFormat [hence ODF] issue to the fight between Token Ring and TCPIP/Ethernet. And I think we all know how that one turned out.

Keep in mind one thing that Bernard overlooks – Massachusetts and Microsoft are still pretty annoyed at each other over last year’s antitrust case. You may recall that the Bay State fought Microsoft to the bitter end as the lone holdout and ultimately had its appeal for more stringent antitrust sanctions denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Yippee -- I think the fun is just beginning!