[Trainer-talk] Brief comments on Outlook.com

[David Goldfield]

A few weeks ago, someone on this list asked about the accessibility of 
Outlook.com with screen readers.  I didn't answer the initial post as I 
hadn't used Outlook.com but have been meaning to do so for some time.  A 
few days ago, I decided to try it out and wanted to report my findings.
First, I'm using a system running Windows 7 Professional, 32-bit 
edition.  My browser of choice is Firefox and I'm running version 27, 
which is the latest version as of the time of this writing.  I do have 
Internet explorer 11 as well but haven't tried Outlook.com with that 
particular browser.  The screen reader is NVDA 2013.3.
When I opened Outlook.com for the first time, I was somewhat surprised 
to see that I already had an email account set up, linked to my 
verizon.net email address.  This must have happened as I've set up a 
Microsoft Live account in the past, which I did to communicate on their 
answers forum at answers.microsoft.com, a very good service, I should add.
Anyway, I found the links and options fairly usable, and also set up 
what they call an alias, which has an Outlook.com address, a concept I 
don't pretend to fully understand.  I was able to access and send 
messages, though the site seemed to lack many of the Aria controls that 
I find in Yahoo's Webmail, which tries to emulate an actual email 
program.  While I had no real accessibility issues, I don't usually 
prefer or recommend using a Webmail service and prefer using a standard 
email client.  Once I set up my outlook.com address, I successfully was 
able to get Mozilla Thunderbird to get configured with my account in a 
few minutes by supplying my user name, email address and password.  
Thunderbird is very similar to Outlook in its command structure, is 
free, gets updated frequently and uses the classic old-school menu bar 
as opposed to the ribbon that Microsoft is totally obsessed with.  If I 
were working with a consumer with an Outlook.com account, I'd try to 
convince him or her to use an email client such as Outlook, Windows Live 
Mail or Thunderbird.  Btw, you can grab Thunderbird at
www.getthunderbird.com
I hope these comments are somewhat helpful.