[nvda] Re: OpenOffice accessibility

You are right, open office does have a layer of accessibility that doesn't depend on java access, but I think that when this topic came up before there was a possible difficulty in using UNO (the open office accessibility layer).
As that page you gave a link to seems to say, OO implemented the UNO accessibility layer, so that they have a common accessibility layer to bridge from to platform specific accessibility APIs. They have made interfaces to the gnome accessibility layer, but that is really most use to Linux and unix systems, and an interface to the java accessibility layer. MSAA doesn't really provide sufficient information for all that they want in OO, so they haven't bridged UNO to MSAA.
Other than that possible problem with NVDA using UNO which I mentioned before, it is also best to support standard APIs rather than application specific APIs, as a general API grants access to many apps, so lowering the work on the assistive technology developers (as they don't have to write an interface for every app they wish to support). If NVDA supports OO by using the java access bridge, imagine all those java apps you will get access to, where as if NVDA only supported UNO all that work will only give you access to OO. 

From
Michael Whapples
----- Original Message ----- From: "Petr Řehák" <peersoft@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 10:38 AM
Subject: [nvda] OpenOffice accessibility



Hello,

according to web pages of OpenOffice.org, I think they've already put much
effort into implementing accessibility features so that assistive
technologies such as screen readers can benefit from it and make OpenOffice 
applications accessible. I suppose that it is now the developers turn to
implement such features. The OpenOffice accessibility API claims not to be
dependent upon any JAVA access bridge, just go and read:
http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/at-support.html

Petr

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