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Re: Accessible documents and LibreOffice

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From: Christophe Strobbe
Date: Nov 22, 2011 10:42AM

Hi John,

At 18:01 22-11-2011, John E Brandt wrote:
>(...)
>I never think of the right-click on the Mac because... there isn't any. But
>you can accomplish the same thing in the word processor application of
>LibreOffice on the Mac by double clicking the image or by holding the
>Control button and clicking on the image. This brings up a "Picture"
>dialogue box that has as a choice "Options." Note I do not see this in the
>menu bar or in the picture edit floating toolbox.

The "Alternative (Text only)" field in the Options tab in the Picture
dialog contains the same value as the Title field in the Description
dialog. However, the Options tab in the Picture dialog provides no
field for a long description.


>Within Options there is a place to add a "Name" the image and provide
>"Alternate Text." It works similarly in the presentations application in
>LibreOffice, but it uses different terms.

The name field, as far as I know, is mainly used internally. If I
rename it, I always make sure to use a value that would be a valid ID
in HTML (i.e. no spaces, first character can't be a number, ...), so
the ID is usable after I export the file to HTML.


>I also checked this with VoiceOver. It is a little funky, but I was able to
>get VO to read the ALTs in both the word processor and the presentations.

In a presentation, does it make a difference whether you have given
the image a name or not? In Impress, images don't have a name by
default, while Writer automatically generates a name when you insert
an image. (And when you have more than one image on the same slide
and you have given each a name, you can reorder them in the
Navigator. I would expect that this determines in what order
they/their text alternatives are read out by a screen reader.)


>As
>neither Pages (iWork) or MS-Office for Mac are able to work effectively with
>VO, LibreOffice is really the only accessible alternative for the Mac.

On Windows, IBM Lotus Symphony appears to be much more accessible
than LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org because it uses IAccessible2
instead of the Java Accessibility API (and some other UI work). If
someone is willing to compare the accessibility of the Mac OS X
versions of IBM Lotus Symphony and LibreOffice, I would be very
interested to hear about their findings.

Oh, and please give AccessODF a try ;-) :
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/accessodf/>;

Best regards,

Christophe


>There are some navigation issues with LibreOffice and VO and I crashed the
>application twice while banging on it with VO. But it will work.
>
>Thanks again.
>
>~j
>
>John E. Brandt
>www.jebswebs.com
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
>207-622-7937
>Augusta, Maine, USA
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Christophe
>Strobbe
>Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 6:10 AM
>To: WebAIM Discussion List
>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessible documents and LibreOffice
>
>Hi John,
>
>At 22:04 21-11-2011, John E Brandt wrote:
> >(...)
> >Using my MacBook Pro (Lion), I just installed the latest LibreOffice
> >package (for Mac). I am now trying to find a way to add alternative
> >descriptions to images/pictures in the word processor and presentations
> >package. Can't seem to find it. I see a way to add captions to images
> >in the word processor - but that is not what I want. Nothing in
>presentation app.
>
>As a sighted user on Windows, I right-click on the image and select
>"Description" from the context menu. This brings up the Description dialog
>where you can enter the "Title" (alt text) and, if necessary, a longer
>description.
>
>Selecting a image from the keyboard turns out to be more difficult. I have
>not found a way to do this in the editing area. An alternative path is:
>* open the Navigator with F5, and find the image in the Navigator,
>* press Enter, so the image in the editing area gets selected,
>* press Shift + F10 to open the context menu, then select "Description" from
>that menu.
>
>I don't know if the procedure is the same on Mac OS X.
>If you can't select the image or if the context menu has no "Description"
>item in the Mac OS version, please let me know and I'll register a bug for
>this.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Christophe
>
>
>--
>Christophe Strobbe
>K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD Research Group on
>Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
>B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
>BELGIUM
>tel: +32 16 32 85 51
>http://www.docarch.be/
>Twitter: @RabelaisA11y
>---
>Open source for accessibility: results from the AEGIS project
>www.aegis-project.eu
>---
>Please don't invite me to Facebook, Quechup or other "social networks". You
>may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but I haven't.
>
>