Hello Chris and list, It’s obvious that Microsoft has put some thought into how VO accessibility should be implemented throughout this suite, so I hate to be too picky. Nevertheless, here are my first impressions of the iPhone version of Microsoft Office. I do not currently have access to the iPad version so I cannot comment on its functionality. I do, however, have an Office 365 subscription, so I have full access to the suite.
In the iPhone version of Word, I haven’t figured out how to do too much beyond basic text editing. For example, I am unable to work with tables as I can in Pages. I also found that navigating by line with VO could sometimes be unreliable in that VO would stop speaking the contents of the line under the cursor, but I am also experiencing this problem in some other apps while running iOS 8.1 so it may not be a Microsoft Word issue. Microsoft Excel seems to be the most accessible app in the suite. There are custom voiceover hints built-in as well as a custom gesture: a two-finger double-tap to open an edit menu for a cell. I am quite impressed with my first tour of Excel. Microsoft PowerPoint has clearly also had some accessibility built in, but on my iPhone 5s running iOS 8.1 it simply crashes too much to be usable. It is clear that both playing and editing presentations have great potential to work with VO as most of the controls speak well. I was able to open a large PowerPoint presentation and move through the slides and see the content of each slide. I was also able to select one of the text boxes in my presentation to begin editing it. Unfortunately, before I do much I am usually faced with the app crashing. At that point you have to re-launch the app and start afresh, only to find, at least on my device, that it crashes again before too long. These apps integrate with a number of places for storing files including Dropbox, which I am very impressed with. The menu options also appear to be quite accessible. In short, the apps have a great foundation and with some improvements may turn out to be a wonderful productivity suite, but I can’t rely on them yet, with the exception, perhaps, of Excel. Grant Sent from mobile On Nov 7, 2014, at 2:49 PM, Christopher Hallsworth <[email protected]> wrote: Hi all Yes, Microsoft Office is now available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad at a right price, absolutely free! You can download the individual apps Word, Excel and PowerPoint right now from your nearest App Store. Best of all, it is very, very accessible! I tried both Word and Excel and can get the basics at least done with full VoiceOver support! I congratulate Microsoft on their efforts, and hope they keep it this way and is a good sign for things to come, such as an accessible Office for OS X. Enjoy! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
