Greg Kearney wrote:
Microsoft Office 08 was delayed so that the program could be rewritten
in Apple's Xcode development system with a Cocoa interface.
I've read reports that Office 2008 is mainly written in Carbon, e.g.:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/mac-office-2008-review.ars
What makes you think it's interface is all Cocoa?
I have some experience in using that system and can tell you that you have to make
an almost deliberate effort to make a program which is not accessible in
it.
That's true as long as you stick with standard controls, for which Apple
has provided a built-in representation in the accessibility tree.
Here's what Microsoft say about VoiceOver compatibility with Office:
"Hear most menu commands, dialog boxes, and other elements on your
computer screen. Does not work with the contents of the main document
window. For example, VoiceOver does not read your text in a Word document."
http://tinyurl.com/28z7zu (under "Mac OS X Universal Access features
used in Office 2008")
Menu commands, dialog boxes and so on probably use Apple's standard
controls. The main document pane almost certainly wouldn't, but would
likely be written from scratch to provide heavily customized
functionality. Like any custom control, developers would need to spend
time to work out a way to represent that functionality in the
accessibility tree. It's possible they may have hit a brick wall in the
accessibility API itself. Remember how when Apple released Numbers and
people couldn't read the spreadsheet content with VoiceOver? It's
roughly the same issue.
That's not to say Microsoft shouldn't have done better, it's just to
point out it's not as trivial as you imply.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
