I was able to pop in to MacWorld this week (I work in San Francisco)
and actually talked to one of the developers who worked on Word. He
confirmed and was able to show me several places where they had done
some work on making parts of the interface accessible. He was only
able to talk about code he himself had been able to see but he was
surprised when I showed him how useless the product was if you
actually tried to read the document. I got his business card and he is
going to try and get me in touch with a product manager (I work for an
accessibility services company) so maybe we'll get some answers. I for
one want to make sure the money I just sent on Office 2008 wasn't for
naught.
On Jan 19, 2008, at 1:13 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:
Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Jan 19, 2008, at 1:49 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
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?
Most of the interface will read with VoiceOver, the big issue is the
content area. Even if it is Aqua you can still make it accessible.
It's more work to do it however but it still can be done. Perhaps
they should have switched over to Cocoa for everything.
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.
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.
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."
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
would also point out that a good many one man shops are able to
produce accessible application in spite of their small size and
limited resources. Tables for example is accessible and it is done
by a single programmer working alone.
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.
I am the first to say that Apple is not off the hock on any of this.
Releasing new programs that are not accessible is simply not
acceptable to me it does not matter who does it. But office is in a
special case as so many schools and employers require its use.
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
