Disabled or diffabled?

I'm at USM (Universiti Sains Malaysia) in Penang, Malaysia today and noticed the toilets for the disabled are labeled as for "orang kelainan upaya" (literally: persons with different abilities) instead of "orang kurang upaya" (persons with disabilities) which is the usual terminology. The Vice Chancellor of USM said, "This ["disabled"] designation is not only unfortunate but inaccurate. The reason is plain enough: the so-called "disabled" person is only perceived as such by those who regard themselves as "abled" in appearance, not necessarily substance."

Does OOXML meet the accessibility needs of "persons with different abilities"? The ODF Alliance posted an Issue Brief, ODF's Benchmark for Accessibility that discusses these questions.

Excerpts:

"There are "grave issues with respect to the accessibility of Office Open XML as a format and potential standard that should prclude its adoption at present," according to Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, and Dr. Stephen A. Hockema, faculty member of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, who authored a paper, "Accessibility Issues with Open XML" Many National Bodies, including Canada and New Zealand, noter the OOXML deficiencies with regard to accessibilty that need to be resolved before OOXML can be approves as an international standard."

"Governments should demand that digital documents be accessible to all. A  comprehensive accessibility analysis of OOXML by industry is needed. Until completed and shortcomings addressed, OOXML remains an “inaccessible document format and not suitable for international standardization nor widespread adoption.”"

Is OOXML diff-abled or disabled?

Comments

[Steve Wilkinson]

Congratulations to the USM. I'm all for eliminating the word negative "disabled" and introducing "diffabled" or "diff-abled", my preferred spelling in line with my website.

[Chris Ward]

You have to be careful here. ODF and OOXML are both "storage formats for reviseable office productivity documents"; as such don't really have a lot to do with whether deaf people, or blind people, or fingerless people, can create and access the documents. That's more a property of the application that sits on top of the data.

Back in the early 1980's, the US government was giving subsidies to US states who bought 'accessible' software for use in the public sector; and that sparked the investment which led to Lotus SmartSuite and Microsoft Office.

Where we are now, I'm not so sure. Is OpenOffice.org any different from Microsoft Office, in terms of whether someone with a disability can use it ? If there is any difference, will anyone (most likely a public-sector organisation such as a government) invest to remedy it ?

[Winter]

Chris Ward,

You are right, and Hassan is right too.

"Accessibility" is a feature of applications. But applications can be helped and hindered in their work by the underlying storage model.

Take an example from the first link below:
[[
1. OOXML lacks the ability to link between form fields and their labels
This is about associating form fields with labels in order to describe them, and it helps a document that makes sense to a sighted person make sense to the non-sighted.
]]

This is about the order of the fields in a form. If the order is not sequential, line by line, a spoken read out will result in garbled field names (Family name, phone number) and associated text boxes (Text Box, Text Box).

A document format can help here by allowing a logical link between text box and field name.

You can find discussions of that here:

ACCESSIBILITY AND OOXML
http://holloway.co.nz/ooxml-accessibility.pdf

Accessibility Issues with Office Open XML
http://atrc.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_content&sectionid=14&task=view&hidemainmenu=1&id=371

Open Document Format v1.1 Accessibility Guidelines Version 1.0
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/office-accessibility/v1.0/cd01/ODF_Accessibility_Guidelines-v1.0.odt

Winter