Germany's Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards - TDF Community Blog
blog.documentfoundation.org
The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, welcomes the inclusion of the Open Document Format (ODF) as a mandated standard format in Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal government’s sovereign digital infrastructure framework for all public administrations. The Stack, published by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung), establishes the technical standards for a shared, interoperable and sovereign digital infrastructure serving all Germany’s public administrations. Under the framework’s “Semantic Technologies and Real-Time Analytics” pillar, ODF and PDF/UA are explicitly named as the two mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.” The Deutschland-Stack is grounded in a set of principles that align with TDF’s long-standing advocacy positions. The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage,
  • Zagorath@quokk.auEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean here. Both markdown and LaTeX are plain text. They’re easily read by a screen reader. Though unless the screen reader is specially-designed for LaTeX support, it may be difficult to comprehend. That’s on the screen reader though, not the document format.

    • testaccount372920@piefed.zipEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I assume they mean stuff like image descriptions that you can add in Microslop Word (don’t know about LibreOffice). It’s quite a neat feature that wouldn’t work with markdown (might work with LaTeX), because these image descriptions are not visible to someone reading a document.

      • Zagorath@quokk.auEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Image descriptions are a thing in markdown. Images are inserted into markdown documents with this syntax:

        ![alt text](url)
          • Zagorath@quokk.auEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            Both Lemmy and Piefed support it, though weirdly unlike the alt text field when submitting an image post, this syntax only adds alt text, so only screen readers will see it—users can’t view the text on hover.

      • HexesofVexes@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Correct, accessibility also differentiates between titles and content, to better assist readers who use a screen reader.

        • Zagorath@quokk.auEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          I replied to the other user showing how markdown image descriptions work. Titles are added with hashes.

          # title
## subtitle

Text

### sub-sub title

Etc.
          • HexesofVexes@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Screen reader should pick that up.

            It’s a bit trickier in LaTeX (depending on layout), given they convert to an untagged pdf by default using pdftex. For defaults such as section/subsection etc I think some auto-tagging has been added, but my memory is not great.

            Issues crop up when you need to hack something (e.g. indenting parts of a proof using the quote environment to aid readability, creating more complex tables, or just using coloured text to indicate element relations), and here manual tagging is a must!