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

[Gary Wunder]

One wonders, with all the accessibility summits, high-level meetings, and
statements of computing for all, just how Office 13 gets out the door with
so little accessibility. What is the disconnect? Do the accessibility folks
have any power in their company's structure? Who purchases it--does the
federal government, and does it contrive a way to declare it 508 compliant?

I think one of the questions we ought to address with Microsoft and other
companies, perhaps at the meeting of the national federation of the blind in
computer science, is whether they see accessibility as a nice feature
(included at whim for the unfortunates in the world), or whether they see it
as a moral imperative? Perhaps we should put the same question to those
involved in the enforcement of Section 508, though I know very well that
they have very little power in their organizations and that their reporting
to the chief information officers in their units does not by the power and
prestige one would think from reading the statute and regulations. 

-----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



_______________________________________________
nfbcs mailing list
nfbcs at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbcs_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nfbcs:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbcs_nfbnet.org/gwunder%40earthlink.net