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

Mon Feb 24 17:15:02 UTC 2014

I agree and have a name to suggest for the agenda.  One person I'd talk to is Tim Heuer.  I've copied him so you have his work contact.  I've pinged him with accessibility questions before and gotten good responses from him.
Bryce
On Feb 24, 2014, at 9:08 AM, Gary Wunder <gwunder at earthlink.net> wrote:

> 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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