[nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress

Fri Mar 14 05:16:04 UTC 2014

Does anyone else know about or better yet remember the screen rover?  If 
what I read about the system pointed a fixed camera at a computer screen 
and pulled that image into an ocr unit and sent the characters out to a 
hardware speech synthesizer for speech.  It was a Canadian invention and 
used a 386 computer to run.  The company that made those either 
discontinued them or went out of business several years ago.

On Tue, 25 Feb 2014, John G. Heim wrote:

> 
> 
> It seems unlikely to me that you'd ever point a camera at a computer screen
> and have a person read it to you even if there was money for such a system.  I
> would think it would be way more likely that we could see something like a
> genaralized version of webvisum. You You'd never point a camera at a screen
> when a screen capture would  give so much better resolution. In fact, there's
> little point in transmitting the image over the network when most PCs have
> plenty of power to  spare for OCR.  I don't use jaws but my understanding is
> that as of jaws 13, it already has such a feature.
> 
> I'm not sure why the webvisum plugin transmitted the cpatcha to it's server
> instead of solving it on the end-user's PC. They were very secretive about
> their technology. I don't think the solution involved human intervention
> though.
> 
> It might not be practical but if you are really stuck, you could probably take
> a screen capture, load it into a paint program, and then ask jaws to red it to
> you with the OCR feature.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 02/24/14 11:00, Mike Freeman wrote:
> > Gary:
> >
> > I confess that I am beginning to think we're running up against something we
> > ought to be familiar with, being Federationists, but that we don't want to
> > face. That "something" is that we, the blind, are a minority. This is
> > something we're going to come up against more and more as the general
> > universe seeks bling more than information.
> >
> > I confess that I'm beginning to suspect that unless and/or until we come up
> > with *absolutely* iron-clad legislation that, in effect, limits what
> > software vendors are allowed to do to those things wherein we can guarantee
> > accessibility -- in effect, limiting innovation  -- something which I
> > obviously know won't happen -- we're going to be behind the eight ball even
> > with vendors who claim to put accessibility first.
> >
> > I think more and more we will find ourselves forced to old, tried-and-true
> > but much-forgotten and much-maligned strategies -- such as -- gasp -- use of
> > readers.
> >
> > I believe Deborah Kent-Stein and I talked about this a while back and *she*
> > thinks we'll eventually have to come round to a TapTapSee-like app that
> > allows us to point a camera at indecipherable screens and have someone tell
> > us what's going on. I don't think even that would work as corporations would
> > frown on their networks being used for such things and might balk at the
> > possibilities of theft of corporate secrets or intellectual property.
> >
> > Mike Freeman
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Gary Wunder
> > Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 7:09 AM
> > To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List'
> > Subject: Re: [nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress
> >
> > I still respectfully suggest that we put Microsoft on the agenda and try to
> > find out why accessibility always seems to be at the bottom of their
> > priority list. Did screen reader developers have a look at this before it
> > came on the market? Why is it that we were still wrestling with problems in
> > Outlook 2007 when Outlook 2010 hit the market? Is there any kind of
> > consistency between the statement "computing for all" and the kind of
> > release strategy we see from Microsoft?
> >
> > Gary
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Elizabeth
> > Campbell
> > Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 8:08 AM
> > To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List'
> > Subject: Re: [nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress
> >
> > Hello Curtis,
> >
> > I am using Office 13 at home on my laptop running Windows 8. I must confess
> > that I did not have  the installation headaches as I purchased my system and
> > software from Bestbuy. The store in my area has a very helpful geek squad,
> > and I explained that I wanted to put the computer through its paces using
> > JAWS and so forth before I purchased it.
> > The Best Buy folks took care of all of the installations for me as I
> > purchased a year of tech support for my devices.
> > I primarily use office 13 for Outlook and Word. I am a fan of outlook, so I
> > was very disappointed to see that it often crashes, sometimes while I'm
> > reading or writing a message then mysteriously restarts. IN Word, I haven't
> > used the return address features since I'm creating documents for use at
> > home or at work, and I send 99 percent of my correspondences via email.
> > However, I've had a lot of frustration accessing documents that are
> > protected.
> > JAWS will start reading the file and then stop. I believe what happens is
> > that Word shuts down and then restarts because I get a prompt about
> > recovering files which I can never find.
> > Interestingly enough, I ran in to this problem last week when accessing some
> > documents for a Newsline seminar.
> > I believe there is a way to unprotect files, but I haven't found it yet.
> > Curtis, I agree that Office 13 is very much a work in progress, and I hope
> > Microsoft does come out with a service pack that will repair these bugs
> > which make it almost impossible to use Office reliably.
> > At work, I an using Windows 7 and Office 2007,and I haven't had the same
> > frustrations.
> >
> > Best regards.
> >
> > Liz Campbell
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Curtis Chong
> > Sent: Friday, February 21, 2014 11:06 AM
> > To: nfbcs at nfbnet.org
> > Subject: [nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress
> >
> > Greetings and felicitations:
> >
> > Early this month, I took the rather bold step of upgrading from Microsoft
> > Office 2010 to Microsoft Office 2013. I am running the 64-bit version of
> > Windows 7 Professional.
> >
> > I am interested in hearing from anyone out there who has taken a similar
> > journey. Permit me to provide a brief summary of my experiences so far.
> >
> > To begin with, the upgrade was not at all a trouble-free experience. The
> > first thing that Office 2013 wanted me to do was to link to either an
> > existing or new Microsoft account. There appears no way to avoid this step.
> > Since I had a Microsoft account (which I had never used for years and years)
> > I had to spend considerable time trying to get my password back. This was
> > only the first problem.
> >
> > Then, Office wanted to set up Sky Drive on my computer, which I allowed at
> > first and have since removed.
> >
> > After the install was finished (hours of work), I tried starting Word. Right
> > away, I received a message (which was not spoken by JAWS for Windows)
> > indicating that the program had stopped working. There seemed to be no way
> > around this problem. In the end, I had to contact Microsoft Support over the
> > telephone so that someone could remote into my computer and run some kind of
> > a repair.
> >
> > While I am now using Microsoft Office 2013 to do real work, I must point out
> > that using this software is not without its problems. For one thing, there
> > are many situations during which JAWS goes silent and during which one
> > simply has to wait for something to happen. For another, there are frequent
> > instances when either Word or Outlook will crash and then recover--all in
> > complete silence (from a nonvisual access standpoint).
> >
> > I don't know about the rest of you, but one strategy which I often use is to
> > open a master document from Windows Explorer, bringing it into Word, then
> > save the document under a different name so that I can work on it. On my
> > system right now, there is no way to do this anymore. As soon as I hit F12
> > to invoke the "Save As..." dialog, Word will immediately crash.
> > Interestingly, this does not happen on the Office 2013 system I am using at
> > work. Go figure.
> >
> > There are two other problems worth mentioning. First, in Word, the return
> > and delivery address edit boxes in the Envelopes dialog are not accessible
> > with any screen access program. You simply cannot read the text that may (or
> > may not) be in these boxes. Secondly, in Outlook 2013, the Signature
> > dialog's edit box is just as inaccessible to a nonvisual user as the
> > Envelopes edit boxes in Word.
> >
> > These days, for new users, it is just about impossible to acquire Office
> > 2010. This is most unfortunate inasmuch as I consider Office 2013 to be very
> > much a work in progress. I very much am looking forward to a service pack on
> > this from Microsoft.
> >
> > Cordially,
> >
> > Curtis Chong
> >
> >
> >
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> 
> 

jude <jdashiel at shellworld.net>