ODF Alliance Press Release
ODF Alliance Lauds Accessibility Enhancements, International Adoptions and Launch of New National Chapters
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Kathryn Brownlee, Rational PR, 202-429-1833
Marino Marcich, ODF Alliance, 202-789-4450,
Jomar Silva, ODF Alliance Brasil,
Washington, DC., May 9, 2008. The ODF Alliance today congratulated the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which maintains and improves the OpenDocument Format (ODF), on advances that will help people with disabilities gain access to computers and information. The Alliance also welcomed news of international ODF adoptions as well as the launch of national chapters in several additional countries.
“Approval of the accessibility guidelines marks an important milestone in OASIS’s efforts to ensure that users with disabilities are equally able to read, create, and edit ODF documents as their mainstream colleagues. The new guidelines describe what steps must be taken to ensure that users with disabilities achieve these capabilities,” said ODF Alliance managing director Marino Marcich. “The guidelines, together with the enhancements approved last year, will help ensure that ODF continues to meet or exceed the accessibility features of any other document format.” The ODF Accessibility Guidelines v1.0 can be found at:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/office-accessibility/v1.0/cs01/.
The accessibility advances come on the heels of announcements by standards bodies in South Africa, Brazil, and Croatia of their approval of ODF as a national standard. The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) approved ODF as a national standard in April following the government’s announcement late last year that ODF will be the standard for document exchange between government agencies and the public.
The final translated version of ODF was also recently approved by Brazil’s National Standards Association, ABNT, paving the way for ODF’s adoption as a Brazilian national standard (ABNT NBR ISO/IEC 26300:2008).
“The decision should provide strong impetus for other regional and municipal governments in Brazil to adopt ODF for creating, exchanging, and saving documents,” said Jomar Silva, Executive Director, ODF Alliance Brasil. “With this national seal of approval, products implementing support for ODF may also be preferred in government tenders.”
In 2006, with the publication of version 2.0 of its e-Ping Interoperability Framework, Brazil became the first country in South America to officially adopt ODF as its recommended format. In December 2007, Parana, a state in southern Brazil, became the second regional government in South America and sixth globally to adopt ODF.
In addition to adoption by governments, new ODF Alliance national chapters were launched in Hungary in April and Latvia earlier this year. “The launch of an ODF Alliance national chapter in Hungary gives Hungarian citizens a strong voice for widespread use of an open format and open standards generally in the Hungarian public sector,” said Gábor Szentiványi, head of international relations, ODF Alliance Hungary.
“With national chapters now established in Brazil, India, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Poland, Portugal, Hungary and Latvia, the ODF Alliance has been able to enhance its truly global footprint,” said Marcich. “With the expected arrival of ODF v1.2 later this year, which includes support for extensible metadata, formula, and digital signatures, we expect the ODF-supporting community to continue to grow.”
The OpenDocument Format Alliance is an organization of governments, academic institutions, non-government organizations and industry dedicated to educating policy makers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of ODF.