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

Fri Feb 21 21:26:32 UTC 2014

I don't wish to imply that I know anything about accessibility of Office 
2013, I am a linux user. But if it's all that bad, the NFB  may have to 
sue some institution for forcing it upon it's employees and/or students. 
  That's the only way to get institutions to pay attention to the 508 
regs. We can all help with this by letting as many people as possible 
know about the problem.  People don't get why we are so strict about 
demanding compliance.

The thing is that the regulations are meaningless if we don't demand 
strict compliance.  No instution will ever pay attention to 
accessibility unless we demand that the 508 regulations be enforced. 
That's just the nature of the beast. Every administrator of every 
department in every institution thinks they don't have the time, the 
money, or the man power to bother with accessibility. It will never get 
done if we don't insist on compliance.

The 508 regulations must be enforced or blind people will be second 
class citzens.  Those are the choices.

On 02/21/14 14:34, Gary Wunder wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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-- 
---
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu