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

Mon Feb 24 18:26:25 UTC 2014

Dear Mike:

Perhaps one of the things we need to address is whether or not making things
screen reader compatible truly does limit innovation. Is screen reader
technology so far behind state-of-the-art technology that this is the case,
or are we talking about the failure to add a few lines of code in this new
technology that makes it play well with the assistive technology we need? I
lack the expertise to answer this question, but it seems to me to be all
important. We go to Congress each year with the message that accessibility
is easy and doable. I have never heard the software companies argue to the
contrary. What I do often hear from software developers is that it is too
costly to go back and modify their legacy code but that new development will
certainly incorporate accessibility. Only recently have I heard the idea
that demanding accessibility threatens innovation. Can someone with some
expertise in state-of-the-art coding and state-of-the-art screen reader
technology set me straight. It seems to me that this argument, if true,
changes where we need to place our emphasis. If it is false, it needs to be
revealed as such. If it is true, then we need to place more emphasis on
bringing the screen readers into the second decade of the twenty-first
century.

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Mike Freeman
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 11:00 AM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress

Gary:

I confess that I am beginning to think we're running up against something we
ought to be familiar with, being Federationists, but that we don't want to
face. That "something" is that we, the blind, are a minority. This is
something we're going to come up against more and more as the general
universe seeks bling more than information.

I confess that I'm beginning to suspect that unless and/or until we come up
with *absolutely* iron-clad legislation that, in effect, limits what
software vendors are allowed to do to those things wherein we can guarantee
accessibility -- in effect, limiting innovation  -- something which I
obviously know won't happen -- we're going to be behind the eight ball even
with vendors who claim to put accessibility first.

I think more and more we will find ourselves forced to old, tried-and-true
but much-forgotten and much-maligned strategies -- such as -- gasp -- use of
readers.

I believe Deborah Kent-Stein and I talked about this a while back and *she*
thinks we'll eventually have to come round to a TapTapSee-like app that
allows us to point a camera at indecipherable screens and have someone tell
us what's going on. I don't think even that would work as corporations would
frown on their networks being used for such things and might balk at the
possibilities of theft of corporate secrets or intellectual property.

Mike Freeman

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Gary Wunder
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 7:09 AM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress

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

_______________________________________________
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/batescampbell%40charter.n
et

_______________________________________________
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

_______________________________________________
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/k7uij%40panix.com

_______________________________________________
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