Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Creating Accessible Documents with LibreOffice / OpenOffice.org Writer Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven, Belgium Bert Frees, Vincent Spiewak

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Overview ● AEGIS project ● Accessibility: short introduction ● LibreOffice Writer features ● Accessible authoring ● ODT Accessibility Checker ● Export as DAISY & Braille ● Export to PDF ● LibreOffice Accessibility Issues

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 The AEGIS Project ● EC-funded project, Sep Aug.2012 ● 20+ partners, including Oracle (Sun), AOL, RIM, Vodafone Foundation, K.U.Leuven, … ● Access to desktop, RIAs and mobile applications ● Many open-source “prototypes” / products ●

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Accessibility: Introduction (1) ● Blind users ● No pointing device => keyboard access ● UI & content rendered as Braille and/or synthetic speech ● = sequential access ● Access depends on text alternatives and other metadata exposed through (accessibility) APIs

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Accessibility: Introduction ● Other vision deficiencies: ● Colour blindness (red-green) ● Loss of peripheral vision, loss of central vision, blurred vision, … ● Persons who need magnification (even x32 or x64)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Accessibility: Introduction ● Hearing-impaired users ● If congenitally deaf, native language = sign language ● Captioning for video ● Transcripts for audio

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Accessibility: Introduction ● Motor-impaired users ● Due to muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, … ● Use of pointing device may be difficult, even impossible => keyboard access => alternative input devices, e.g. eye tracking, head tracking, …

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Accessibility: Introduction ● Dyslexia, learning disabilities, cognitive impairments ● Make text easier to read ● Use illustrations ● Examples: 15 AEGIS personas > Results > Personas (Creative Commons)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 LibreOffice Writer Features: 1 ● File formats: ● OpenDocument Format (ODT) ● export to/save as PDF, XHTML, DocBook, DocX,... ● export to DAISY, Braille ● Export to accessible document requires accessible source document

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 LibreOffice Writer Features: 2 ● Applying styles ● Styles and Formatting panel (F11) ● Navigator (F5)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Document Structure ● Document title: Title & Subtitle ● Structure: Heading 1, Heading 2,... ● Find empty headings with Navigator → “Clear formatting” in styles

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Lists ● Toolbar buttons for unordered and numbered lists (or Format → Bullets and Numbering) ● List styles (more fiddly)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Columns ● Don’t use tables or whitespace (e.g. tabs) to fake columns ● Format -> Columns...

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Visual Design ● Font faces designed for use on screens: ● Sans-serif: Verdana, Trebuchet MS ● Serif: Georgia ● Avoid justified text (rivers of whitespace) ● Avoid long spans of text in ALL CAPS or italics

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Images and Non-Text Objects (1) ● Add alternative text: context menu → ● Description... → Title & Description ● Picture... → Options: Alternative (Text only) (=Title)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Images and Non-Text Objects (2) ● OOo 3.2/3.3 & Libo bug: ● add text alternative after caption and/or anchor change ● Export to (X)HTML: bugs: ● alt attribute value = Description ● Title is not exported ● Math & scientific formula ● Safest option = replace MathML with image + description

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Tables (1) ● Don’t use tabs or spaces to fake tables ● Menus: Table → Insert → Table... ● For header row: change style from “Table Contents” to “Table Heading”

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Tables (2) ● Make header row repeat ● Disable the option “Allow rows to break across pages and columns”

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Tables (3) ● Never nest tables inside other tables! ● Avoid merged cells ● Break up complex tables into simpler ones ● Avoid empty cells => “not applicable” / “no”/ … ● Avoid images inside tables

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Language (1) ● Mark up the default language of a document ● Mark up language changes in the document

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Language (2) ● Export to (X)HTML: default language and languages changes need to be defined again ● Export to PDF: check language in document properties; if necessary use Adobe Acrobat to correct the language, e.g. “en-GB” → English

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Colour and Contrast ● Don’t rely on colour alone to convey information (diagrams!) ● Sufficient contrast between foreground and background information in text, charts and images ● Paciello Group Colour Contrast Analyser

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 ODT Accessibility Checker ● New extension, soon to be released (English, Spanish, Dutch) ● Evaluate accessibility ● Errors ● Warnings ● Repair suggestions ● Sometimes (semi- )automatic repair

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Export as DAISY (1) ● odt2daisy: Export ODT as DAISY 2.02 & 3.0 ● OOo Writer 3.0 or higher, or LibreOffice ● Uses DAISY Pipeline Lite ● Pipeline uses text-to-speech engines available on user’s OS ●

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Export as DAISY (2) ● Export as DAISY XML ● Export as Full DAISY ● Multilingual content ● Metadata (Title) ● Sentence detection ● Fix routines

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Emboss / Export as Braille (1) ● odt2braille extension: emboss ODT files/ export ODT files to Braille ● Uses liblouisxml & liblouis for parts of the conversion ● Emboss on limited set of embossers (Interpoint, Index Braille, Braillo) ●

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Emboss / Export as Braille (2) ● Export to “Braille Formatted files” (.brf;.bra) ● Export to Portable Embosser Format (PEF): embosser-independent; uses XML and Unicode ● Currently only on Windows; Debian package is in progress

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Emboss / Export as Braille (3) Detailed customisation of Braille output

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Export as PDF ● General tab: check ● “Tagged PDF” ● “Export Bookmarks” ● Initial View tab: check ● “Bookmarks and Page” ● These checkboxes remain checked

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 LibreOffice Accessibility Issues (1) ● Accessible title and description on image disappear when caption is added ● Accessible title and description on image disappear when anchor is change (e.g. to “As character”) ● Extension manager: tabbing out of list of extensions does not work when focus is on non-removable extension

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 LibreOffice Accessibility Issues (2) ● No explicit connection between label and field in extension GUI created through UNO API? ● Default language for presentation / spreadsheet not visible in status bar of Impress / Calc ● No language identification for sections / spans of text in Impress and Calc

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 LibreOffice Accessibility Issues (3) ● Impress PDF export ● Text alternatives for images are not preserved ● “All of the text on this page lacks a language specification” (each slide) ● “Tab order may be inconsistent with the structure order” (some slides) ● “None of the comments or other types of annotations on this page are contained in the structure tree” (some slides)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 LibreOffice Accessibility Issues (4) ● Accessibility on Windows: ● Java Accessibility API: poor support in Windows screen readers ● In 2010 IBM donated IAccessible2 implementation to Oracle; integration not complete when Oracle abandoned OpenOffice.org ● Oracle donated OOo to Apache Found. ● IAccessible2 maybe in OpenOffice.org (Apache Foundation)

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, Strasbourg, 9-14 July 2011 Questions? Comments? ● Contact: ● (April Accessibilité, LibreOffice Accessibility,...) ● See also ● Accessible Digital Office Document project: