Blackmoor Vituperative

A group of visually impaired campaigners have brought a temporary halt to plans by the US state of Massachusetts to move to open source document format (ODF), because the software to read them does not work with screen magnifiers.

Gutierrez found himself in a bind in February when he assumed the CIO’s position in Massachusetts. The state’s ODF policy called for executive-branch agencies by 1 January 2007, to use office applications that work with ODF and to configure those applications to save documents in ODF by default.

But the only office applications that could do that – such as the open source OpenOffice and Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice – are not supported by the major screen readers and magnifiers that people with disabilities use. It sparked an outcry.

(from Techworld.com, Visually impaired prevent Massachusetts move to open source)

This is a load of crap. A tiny fraction of Massachusetts citizens are forcing an entire state full of people to be subjected to (and pay for) proprietary, closed-source software, costing the state and the citizens of that state extraordinary amounts of money, not to mention the damage they are causing to the state’s long-term goal of making all state documents accessible to everyone. Would I rather that third-party accessibility software support ODF? Of course I would. But the people of Massachusetts should not be shackled to expensive proprietary software just because a small group of citizens wants to use a proprietary plug-in for that software. That’s ridiculous.

Peter Korn goes into detail about the issues at stake here. I suggest you go read it. It’s detailed, and I’m not going to quote it all here.