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

[Steve Jacobson]

Curtis,

This is an important issue in that it is next to impossible to reliably buy older versions of Office any longer.  
As you may remember, someone I know bought Office 2010 from a source that turned out to have already sold the 
product key to someone else.  I don't know why it has to be this way, but I've come to expect that I will have 
more trouble with Microsoft installs as that has been my experience over the years.  

Have you experimented to see what NVDA does with the return address?  As you know, I am concerned about the state 
of accessibility just now even though we have made many gains.  More often than ever I see inconsistencies between 
screen readers, but I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't have some responsibility for all this.  My employer uses Sky 
Drive Pro, and I am finding it to be somewhat flaky with Window-Eyes, but it is not all that straight-forward for 
sighted employees in terms of when you have to supply logon credentials.  However, it just seems that Microsoft so 
often is pushing the envelope without regard to how it affects screen readers or even general stability.  Thanks 
to your comments, I'm going to hang on to my older versions of Office with both hands.  <smile>

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 10:06:18 -0700 (GMT-07:00), Curtis Chong wrote:

>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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