ODF Alliance Reports Record Growth in Application Support for ODF

“During September and October, there were more than a dozen announcements of new or improved application support for ODF,” said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance. The non-profit organization names the Mac operating system, IBM's Lotus Symphony, Softmaker's Office 2008, Open Office 2.3, the current beta of Corel's Wordperfect Office , and the new online word processor by Adobe, Buzzword.

ODF also has many supporters in authorities and governments: the organization points out that Open Document has been chosen as the standard format for authorities in South Africa (see the separate news item here), and the Dutch government is current discussing migrating to the free standard.

The ODF Alliance also reports that the Oasis committe has now released the accessibility guidelines for barrier-free use of ODF v1.1 for public discussion. Up to December 21, the public can review Version 1.0 of the Accessibility Guidelines for the free document standard, ODF, and submit suggestions. This ruleset can be seen as the organization's attempt to ensure that users with disabilities will be able to use hardware and software tools to enter information in an ODF document without any restrictions. Tools include special input devices for people without hands, or interpretation aids for users with major vision impairments that describe the images contained in files.

The technical organization behind the Open Document ruleset, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) relies on public opinion from Internet surveys when defining standards. Currently, the OASIS website has the Genericode neben v1.0 draft by the committee for Code List Representation along with the revised ODF guidelines for public appraisal.