[Trainer-talk] OpenOffice/Seeking Beta Testers to Test accessibility

[David Goldfield]

OpenOffice is one of the original free and open source Office suites,
similar to Microsoft Office. The development team is looking for more
people to test the upcoming 4.1 release. Among other things, it
implements better support for screen readers. LibreOffice, a similar
project, is working on the same thing. This will give users a chance to
test drive the next version of OpenOffice with their screen reader of
choice. Their Web site is www.openOffice.org.
I'm trying to spread the word about this because, as you know, not all 
computers come with Office preinstalled and some consumers are unable to 
afford the additional software. Programs like LibreOffice and 
OpenOffice, while they may not quite be ready for prime-time use at this 
time, will soon give consumers a free alternative to using Microsoft 
Office. For the record, I have nothing against Microsoft Office. It is a 
capable set of programs and screen readers work amazingly well with it. 
I would just like to see additional choices and I also am an advocate 
for open source alternatives, as I really like the particular philosophy 
of community-driven software.
Here’s the announcement from their blog.
MONDAY MAR 10, 2014
Seeking Beta Testers for Apache OpenOffice 4.1
We're looking for users interested in test driving our new Apache
OpenOffice 4.1 Beta Release. The beta can be downloaded from our
website (use the yellow box).
We release Beta versions of OpenOffice to get early feedback from users.
Beta versions may have more bugs than our final GA releases and may
not be suitable for tasks which require the highest level of stability.
Beta versions are recommended for experienced users who are willing to
share their feedback with the OpenOffice project.
The 4.1.0 Beta features:
•Mac OS X version is now 64-bit and requires OS X version 10.7 or above.
•Integrated iAccessible2 support, offering better integration with
screen readers.
•Annotations of text ranges in Writer.
•In-place editing of text fields in Writer.
•Interactive image crop feature for Impress and Draw.
•Enhanced support for 3D charts.
•New language translations: Bulgarian, Danish, Hindi, Norwegian Bokmål
and Thai.
•Many bug fixes and smaller improvements as detailed in the Release Notes.
Bug reports can be entered in our Bugzilla database at:
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/. Questions and other feedback, good or
bad, can be sent to our users mailing list at users at openoffice.apache.org.
Thanks in advance to our Beta Testers!
Posted at 06:09PM Mar 10, 2014 by robweir in General | Comments[0] |

-- 

---------

Feel free to visit my LinkedIn profile at
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-goldfield/12/929/573

      David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology specialist