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