Today I met Henrik Omma from the Ubuntu Accessibility team. It was right after I showed the OpenDocument viewer at LugRadio today. Among other things, we talked about how we could turn this viewer into a fully accessible ODF reader. One that can be used, for example, by screen readers. It turns out that this is actually quite easy (on Linux).

To re-cap: The ODF viewer works by turning OpenDocument into HTML and giving it to a Gecko engine. This is a quick and easy way to get a functional viewer.

Now, how do we turn this into a fully accessible ODF reader? Easy, instead of giving the HTML to Gecko, give it to LynX! For those of you who don't know, LynX is a console-based web browser that runs on GNU/Linux. It is very accessible, quite friendly to screen readers.

Using Lynx is a very neat idea:

• You can download the reader now. It took me minutes to have something useful done.
• The download is 8.0KB!
• We retain the base document structure (headings, lists, etc).
• We retain hyperlinks. In particular, the Table of Contents is made of hyperlinks, making large documents easier to navigate.

Try the accessible ODF reader now

You can try the accessible ODF reader right now (if you are runing Linux).

1. Download the reader
2. Extract it and cd to the new directory
3. Run ./odfreader MyDocument.odt

If you need some sample documents, you can use the ODF white paper . If you want to try a large document with a Table of Contents and many links, there is the Open Formula spec.

My next step is to join the Ubuntu a11y mailing list. I'll show them this reader and ask them what they think.