__/ [ Oliver Wong ] on Thursday 24 August 2006 20:34 \__
>
> "Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:2859347.TAHV115t2B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> __/ [ Oliver Wong ] on Thursday 24 August 2006 20:00 \__
>>
>>>
>>> "BearItAll" <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>>> news:1156405542.56949.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>>
> [...]
>>>>> | Open Document Format (ODF) software (Open Office) does not yet
>>>>> work
>>>>> | with screen magnifiers, which make computer documents usable by
>>>>> | those who are legally blind
> [...]
>>>>
>>>> ODF is just xml based, those magnifyers must be able to work with normal
>>>> web
>>>> browser displays, so I can't see this as a serious problem. Not
>>>> something
>>>> that should be used to delay Massachusetts take up of it anyway.
>>>
>>> Yes, but presumably when you're "reading" an ODF document, you're not
>>> looking at the raw XML via your webbrowser, but rather you're using
>>> software like Open Office to display it. I guess what they're complaining
>>> about is a lack of a screen magnifier built into Open Office.
>>>
>>> In Windows XP, there's an OS level utility called "Magnifier" which
>>> will
>>> magnifiy any portion of the screen, and so individual programs don't need
>>> to implement magnifiers themselves. I'd be extremely surprised if Linux
>>> doesn't offer a similar utility, especially since XGL would make this
>>> trivially easy to implement. In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw screen
>>> magnification occur in one of the XGL videos Roy posted.
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUSn-jBA3CE
>>
>> It comes towards the end, IIRC. Not one of the most exciting features,
>> unless
>> you are near-sighted.
>
> I use the "magnifier" utility to get a closer look at some of the
> Japanese characters I'm studying. If they're in websites, I can just use
> FireFox's built in text-enlarging feature (I assume Opera has a similar
> feature, but haven't check yet), but sometimes I run Japanese programs
> which don't have a built in magnification feature.
>
> What would be a much bigger concern, IMHO, are not screen *magnifiers*,
> but screen *readers*. These are software which extract the text from the
> screen and convert them to audio, or use a hardware braille reader to
> translate them into physical bumps. AFAIK, this typically requires explicit
> support from the software to actually expose the text being written. I
> suppose technically, some sort of OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
> solution could be used to take a screenshot of the desktop and try to
> recognize the text being displayed, but this may yield mixed results in the
> case where fancy fonts are used, or when graphics are used in the place of
> plain text.
Adobe's products boast this ability. You can also get Acrobat Reader in Linux
to do screen reading, e.g. for the blind or offline genration of audiocasts.
With open and well-structured formats like XML, it should be easier to
extract and traverse if you are blind. In Web design, standardised sturture
helps traverse the page properly (e.g. XHTML/CSS with alt attribute for
images). That's where LaTeX would fit well when it comes to document. It
embeds startural semantics.
Meanwhile, the idiots will use a crippled plugin that Microsoft robbed from
SourceForge.
Mass. to use Microsoft Office in ODF plan
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6109103.html
I have no doubt Microsoft pushed an agenda here. See my other links that
suggest there was lobbying involved. Maybe some of these disabled people
were shills too.
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | YaSTall SuSE to figure out the magic
http://Schestowitz.com | Free as in Free Beer ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Cpu(s): 19.1% user, 2.7% system, 1.0% nice, 77.3% idle
http://iuron.com - semantic engine to gather information
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