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

Tue Feb 25 15:43:47 UTC 2014

Please define "what  you mean by emphasizing ""bringing the screen 
readers into the second decade of the twenty-firstcentury."

On a related note, all the issues I've seen mentioned  in this thread 
specifically mention jaws. It's not clear if other screen readers, 
Window-eyes or nvda, have the same issues.

On 02/24/14 12:26, Gary Wunder wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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-- 
---
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu