Greg Kearney wrote:
Mac programs should stick to standard controls! All this thinking that you need to reengineer your user interface because somehow your text editing or spreadsheets interfaces are so much improved is a crock. Standard controls are good, they have made the Mac experience what it is today and let Mac users know instantly how to use programs they have never encountered before. Custom control are bad. Particularly in an application as basic as a word processor.
I don't believe that functionality or interfaces beyond the standard controls are unjustified for office software. But in any case, trying to persuade developers to restrict the functionality and interface design of the software they provide is guaranteed to be more of a losing battle than persuading them to make custom functionality and interfaces accessible.
So it is useless. If you can not read the content of a document what good does it do to have the rest of the controls usable. Further we're not talking about some tiny little one man shop here we're talking about Microsoft the biggest software company in the world.
I completely agree that it's "useless". To reiterate, I'm only explaining why making Office 2008 accessible would have involved substantially more development work, not the same amount or less as your original claim about Cocoa suggested. I think it's entirely reasonable to have expected Microsoft to have put in that required work, however.
But office is in a special case as so many schools and employers require its use.
I don't buy that line. Schools and employers can provide Windows and a Windows screen reader for people who need to use Office with a screen reader.
People who don't want to use Windows at all can use create and save Office files with native Mac applications or OpenOffice.org in a free *nix virtual machine. It's true compatibility wouldn't be perfect, but then there's plenty of incompatibilities between different versions of Office anyway. To choose just one major example, lots of companies use Excel spreadsheets which depend on functionality scripted in Visual Basic, but the new Mac version of Office does not support Visual Basic scripting so those documents won't work properly.
Microsoft has set a terrible example for Mac software development. But the way I see it, Apple failing to build an accessible spreadsheet despite having control over the operating system, the accessibility API, and the screen reader in question set an even worse example. I think it's right to demand better from both companies.
-- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
