Will the lab be testing screen readers with products that support ODF? It's what I call a locus of accessibility organizing and expertise. We have several agencies in state government -- the Commission for the Blind, Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Mass. Rehab Commission -- all of whom have specialized knowledge and intelligence in the area of accessibilities. ITD would like to create a locus in the middle for organizing these efforts, understanding how they apply to new systems initiatives generally -- not just ODF -- but also just to provide real hands-on test experience and expertise and, yes, to actually test some of these assistive devices.

What's going to happen with respect to public access of ODF documents, since most people use Microsoft Office and will not be able to open them? First of all, the documents are more transparent in their very essence. They're not tied up in legacy, binary formats. Second of all, options start to emerge where citizens don't have to buy things to work with government documents. And third, over time, interesting things do happen with standards. I think we're seeing the very beginning of a long future of document standards that are maintained by standards bodies and may work over time on the reconciliation of standards. I know there's an immediate market-share concern, but I think this path is one that won't be ending.

But what happens with Microsoft Office users who can't open ODF documents? We do not intend, for instance, to force business partners, cities and towns, constituents to speak a not-very-much-used Esperanto to work with this. The policy itself applies to the executive departments and not to the way in which we transact business with all of our constituents and business partners and cities and towns. So, for instance, other parts of the [ETRM] standard make very clear that the use of HTML or PDF or other very common and accessible formats are appropriate for their own uses. When we look at the portal site, the emphasis there is going to be on these other standards -- on highly accessible HTML, on these mechanisms for providing documents to the public that are easy for them to use. The standard doesn't dictate that we force problems on others, but it does set us on a course to really promoting the use of standardized and open-form documents.

Will executive department employees save in ODF but also save in alternative formats or do format conversions when they know they're making documents available to people who don't have an ODF-compatible office application? When you think about it, that's essentially what happens now. The proportion of documents that are pushed out to the public are a relatively small proportion of things that are operated on here. And when they are pushed out, they're often saved in multiple formats -- a PDF format, an HTML format. That won't change. The root document, instead of being a legacy form like .doc, would be .odf.

When you look back at this whole process -- and granted some of these decisions were made before you were there -- what would you change? I admire the perception that went into the policy objective. But I think in government it's always really important, usually essential, to infer that you've got a full stakeholder buy-in. And I think what I've been hired to do is to really focus on some of the implementation issues that are really the result of the stated policy objective.