[00:00.000 --> 00:16.440]  Okay, next one is me, so somebody else has to watch the time and drag me off the stage.
[00:16.440 --> 00:22.960]  Yeah, welcome to the bit of an update on LibreOffice accessibility, in this particular
[00:22.960 --> 00:25.480]  case PDF accessibility.
[00:25.480 --> 00:32.320]  My name is Thorsten, we're running our own company here, Consulgency, and some products
[00:32.320 --> 00:34.120]  around LibreOffice.
[00:34.120 --> 00:42.840]  This work here has been funded by a customer, so it's always great to have people paying
[00:42.840 --> 00:49.120]  for improvements in LibreOffice, I'm very grateful for that, that's why we can present
[00:49.120 --> 00:50.880]  this today.
[00:50.880 --> 00:58.920]  Quickly, there is a difference between document and application accessibility, so accessibility
[00:58.920 --> 01:07.920]  can be many, many things from the Wikipedia, makes products, devices, services usable by
[01:07.920 --> 01:13.000]  people with disabilities, and of course the main thing that needs to be accessible with
[01:13.000 --> 01:19.480]  LibreOffice is the software itself, and there's been a lot of work ongoing over many years
[01:19.480 --> 01:25.480]  there, but also what LibreOffice produces, the documents also need to be accessible,
[01:25.480 --> 01:33.480]  so that's more on the services side, the products, the outcome there.
[01:33.480 --> 01:37.680]  Application accessibility, as I said, lots of work has been ongoing, there's been two
[01:37.680 --> 01:45.440]  tenders from the foundation, both of them went to HYPRA, and I think one of them, I think
[01:45.440 --> 01:50.960]  there's still a bit of work ongoing there, the first one definitely is finished, that
[01:50.960 --> 02:01.000]  resulted in some cleanups and some checks, and also some build time checking that all
[02:01.000 --> 02:11.400]  the dialogues have all the prerequisites set, so that the GUI remains, is and remains accessible,
[02:11.400 --> 02:17.920]  and the second tender is for actually being able to, like, enabling to run and also, like,
[02:17.920 --> 02:24.760]  not breaking it going forward with the platform accessibility APIs, so that the screen readers
[02:24.760 --> 02:29.360]  and other tools actually work with LibreOffice and make that testable and kind of lock that
[02:29.360 --> 02:31.880]  down.
[02:31.880 --> 02:39.600]  So that was LibreOffice, oh, and Jobs Corner advertising, so LibreOffice is looking for
[02:39.600 --> 02:46.960]  some accessibility engineer, there's a drop posting there, and if you're interested, apply
[02:46.960 --> 02:55.720]  about now, I think the deadline is sometime next week, I believe, closing that, or tell
[02:55.720 --> 02:58.440]  your friends and family.
[02:58.440 --> 03:03.880]  So document accessibility, that's what I'm focusing on, relevant standards, and we're
[03:03.880 --> 03:11.000]  talking about PDF here, some web content accessibility guidelines, that's about HTML
[03:11.000 --> 03:17.280]  mostly, but much of that also applies to other document types, and then that's the PDF UA,
[03:17.280 --> 03:23.080]  the PDF Universal Accessibility Standard, that mandates lots of things, mostly meta
[03:23.080 --> 03:29.600]  data that is at the document, so that suitable tools, like screen readers, can extract that
[03:29.600 --> 03:35.720]  and say, okay, I need to read this, but I don't need to read that, or for images that
[03:35.720 --> 03:42.320]  there is a description, like a textual description of what this image contains.
[03:42.320 --> 03:49.160]  There's a nice overview and an actionable list of checks that you can go through in the
[03:49.160 --> 03:56.560]  so-called Matterhorn protocol, yes, and if you pass that checklist, then you can be pretty
[03:56.560 --> 04:02.040]  sure that your document is accessible, and there's validators for that, the PAC one and
[04:02.040 --> 04:08.760]  the Verapedia pack is closed source, or source available or something, if you ask, and Verapedia
[04:08.760 --> 04:11.440]  is a proper open source.
[04:11.440 --> 04:14.680]  Okay, so what did we do?
[04:14.680 --> 04:16.080]  We fixed a lot of bugs.
[04:16.080 --> 04:22.120]  There are still some bugs left, I hear, about 14 when I checked last, so anybody who's interested
[04:22.120 --> 04:29.640]  in having accessibility bugs fixed, give me a call, and that's what we did.
[04:29.640 --> 04:38.880]  So quite a chunk of things that still had to be fixed after so many years at the, let's
[04:38.880 --> 04:44.600]  say, core level, like actually getting meta data that was already there in the document
[04:44.600 --> 04:50.400]  down into the PDF in the correct way, so like getting the information down, that was the
[04:50.400 --> 04:55.560]  first thing, so that the PDF export could write it to disk, and then also getting it
[04:55.560 --> 05:01.080]  in a proper way, so like at the right position in the meta data structure, not forgetting
[05:01.080 --> 05:10.880]  something, not mistyping some tags, et cetera, yeah, and it's quite across the board what
[05:10.880 --> 05:19.120]  we did there, and I can say that for reasonably complex documents actually we're passing
[05:19.120 --> 05:27.320]  now the accessibility checks, like those validators.
[05:27.320 --> 05:36.320]  So that was actual bug fixing, and we also had to add a few features.
[05:36.320 --> 05:43.920]  The most important one is adding this decorator flag for flies, so if you check the latest,
[05:43.920 --> 05:49.600]  I think we missed 7.4, I'm not sure, but in any case, a recent master, if you insert
[05:49.600 --> 05:56.920]  a text frame, on the options page you get a new checkbox that says decorative, so you
[05:56.920 --> 06:04.720]  can now say this content here is not important for the document, this is just some whatever
[06:04.720 --> 06:10.680]  code of arms for your family, or it's just a background picture, or something that is
[06:10.680 --> 06:16.600]  not really important for the content, it's just decoration.
[06:16.600 --> 06:24.280]  And that was not, that was not saved, also not saved in ODF, so that actually was a feature
[06:24.280 --> 06:28.440]  we had to add to be able to, so users could say okay, this is not important, that is not
[06:28.440 --> 06:33.560]  important, but this is, and then being able to save and reload that.
[06:33.560 --> 06:38.240]  And some UX improvements on the accessibility checker dialogue, which was the work from
[06:38.240 --> 06:45.520]  Colabora, good stuff there, also the third one, the online accessibility checker, if
[06:45.520 --> 06:53.400]  you enable experimental features, then you get on the extras menu, you get some automatic
[06:53.400 --> 07:00.880]  checking thing, which is this one, automatic accessibility checking, and if you do that,
[07:00.880 --> 07:07.360]  you get this kind of counter there, like how many more accessibility bugs do I still need
[07:07.360 --> 07:14.840]  to check or fix, so that part of the toolbar.
[07:14.840 --> 07:23.960]  And so we made the actual dialogue a little bit nicer to use, so in this case, like not
[07:23.960 --> 07:27.960]  making it modal, because if it's modal, you can't interact with the document, so you
[07:27.960 --> 07:35.240]  get a warning, like in this case, no alt text for the image, so you want to kind of select
[07:35.240 --> 07:38.680]  the image and set the alt text, but for that, you need to close the dialogue, so if you
[07:38.680 --> 07:42.720]  have more than, let's say, 10 things there, then you'll forget where you were, so it's
[07:42.720 --> 07:47.240]  much nicer if it's not modal.
[07:47.240 --> 07:52.360]  And yeah, I also have some rescan buttons, so it's kind of orthogonal to this automatic
[07:52.360 --> 08:00.280]  online check, right, so that was that, as I said, in a decent shape now, far from done,
[08:00.280 --> 08:07.040]  the term starts to be usable, future plans is some user experience, so the goal should
[08:07.040 --> 08:13.720]  be to be on par with Word, so really, not having users click four times every single
[08:13.720 --> 08:20.200]  image that they need to put an alt text in, which is really annoying, and do something
[08:20.200 --> 08:26.520]  that is kind of smooth, that is like one click, or even, perhaps, optionally, something like
[08:26.520 --> 08:34.800]  AI supported, auto image generation, or something like that, presumably, or other great ideas,
[08:34.800 --> 08:42.320]  but I think what's really, so I think the basics, the, let's say, technology, the engines
[08:42.320 --> 08:47.920]  there, that's pretty okay, and the focus now should be on the usability, so making what's
[08:47.920 --> 08:53.960]  implemented actually usable, and I guess, that's it, thank you.
[08:53.960 --> 09:00.960]  Thank you.