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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
>
>
>