---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Peter Korn <korn@sun.com> Greetings, The Sun Accessibility team is delighted to announce the establishment of the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project. This work will also allow Sun to build accessibility into the StarOffice productivity suite. OpenOffice.org is the open source community project dedicated to creating an international office suite that will run on all major platforms. Sun contributed all of the StarOffice source files to OpenOffice.org on October 13, 2000. Versions of StarOffice software, beginning with version 6.0 (currently in beta testing), will be built using the OpenOffice.org sources, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. A future version of the Sun-branded StarOffice application suite will utilize the accessibility support being developed by the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project. OpenOffice.org is architecting accessibility support by adopting the Java Accessibility API as the external accessibility interface. This means that existing assistive technologies on Microsoft Windows that support the Java Access Bridge will be able to provide access to future OpenOffice.org applications. In addition, any assistive technologies developed for the GNOME Accessibility Architecture will also be able to provide access to future OpenOffice.org applications. (Today, development of assistive technologies for GNOME includes the recently announced Gnopernicus open source screen reader/magnifier and the open source GOK on-screen keyboard.) In addition to adopting the Java Accessibility API as the published external accessibility interface, the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project is defining an Accessibility API in UNO, the the OpenOffice.org object model. This means that in the future, OpenOffice.org applications could expose their accessibility information in other forms, in addition to the Java Accessibility API. Beyond implementation of the UNO Accessibility API on the individual user-interface elements of the OpenOffice.org applications, the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project is defining the details of the accessibility interfaces to the documents created and viewed by those applications. Providing access to this content -- complex text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations -- poses some of the greatest accessibility challenges faced by assistive technologies, making this an important part of the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project. And as previously announced, in addition to developing programmatic interfaces to document accessibility, the OpenOffice.org project is publishing the XML file formats of those documents, providing an additional accessibility avenue for assistive technologies which can then interact with the documents directly. For details on the OpenOffice.org accessibility project, please see: http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/ For details on the OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API, please see: http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/unoapi.html To view the proposal for presentation document accessibility, please see: http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/proposal-impress.html On behalf of the Sun Microsystems Accessibility team, Peter Korn Sun Microsystems access@sun.com http://www.sun.com/access =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to listserv@java.sun.com and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA-ACCESS". For general help, send email to listserv@java.sun.com and include in the body of the message "help".