Disability rights group frustrates Massachusetts' open source ambitions

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 22 Aug 2006 at 10:41

Massachusetts' open source ambitions have been hit by a disability rights group that argues that some disabled office workers are reliant on technologies not supported by open source applications.

The Disability Policy Consortium has persuaded the CIO of Massachusetts' IT division, Louis Gutierrez, to postpone the implementation of plans to use the Open Document Format (ODF) for all office files from the beginning of 2007.

The consortium is concerned that 'users who have visual, mobility, cognitive, or speech disabilities' will be disadvantaged by the lack of support for screen readers or speech recognition software in open source applications such as OpenOffice and Sun Microsystems' StarOffice that use ODF.

Instead Gutierrez will investigate plug-ins that enable ODF files to be created from Microsoft Office and other Windows applications.

In a joint statement with the Bay State Council of the Blind, the Disability Policy Consortium said in January that disabled workers are reliant on Windows technologies.

'Programs such as "JAWS" and "WindowEyes", the most widely used screen reader programs in the world, are specifically designed to work within a Windows environment and will not function under other operating systems,' the statement said. 'Screen readers exist that will work outside the Windows environment, but they are less functional and are currently used primarily only by those working in computer science fields.'

John Winske, chairman of the Disability Policy Consortium, described the alteration of policy as 'fantastic news'.

'Now, instead of what could have been a very disastrous policy and very bad news for employees with disabilities, we're going to have a strong advocate on our side,' he said.

Massachusetts still intends to see through the transition to ODF for the long-term storage of documents.

Microsoft has criticised its plans, insisting that the new Open XML file format for Office 2007 will be 'completely open'. To that end, it has submitted the format to the Ecma International standards body.

Nonetheless widespread backing for ODF and its adoption as a standard by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) has forced the company to announce in July the creation of the Open XML Translator project, which will provide a set of Open XML-to-ODF conversion tools for both forthcoming Office 2007 and previous versions.