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

Tue Feb 25 15:31:00 UTC 2014

It seems unlikely to me that you'd ever point a camera at a computer 
screen and have a person read it to you even if there was money for such 
a system.  I would think it would be way more likely that we could see 
something like a genaralized version of webvisum. You You'd never point 
a camera at a screen when a screen capture would  give so much better 
resolution. In fact, there's little point in transmitting the image over 
the network when most PCs have plenty of power to  spare for OCR.  I 
don't use jaws but my understanding is that as of jaws 13, it already 
has such a feature.

I'm not sure why the webvisum plugin transmitted the cpatcha to it's 
server instead of solving it on the end-user's PC. They were very 
secretive about their technology. I don't think the solution involved 
human intervention though.

It might not be practical but if you are really stuck, you could 
probably take a screen capture, load it into a paint program, and then 
ask jaws to red it to you with the OCR feature.

On 02/24/14 11:00, Mike Freeman wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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-- 
---
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu