Much of the adaptive technology (eg, screen readers, braille keyboards) are
for users who are either legally or completely blind. However, there are
numerous users who can see but not well (eg, severely nearsighted). For
users such as this - or simply older users - being able to to customize the
UI is critical. 2007 has been designed for a higher resolution (1024 x 768
at least - at 800 x 600 things dialog controls start getting clipped), again
making it difficult for users with vision problems to use. Customization,
such as increasing the size of the icons and text, as well as eliminating
non-essential items from the toolbars, becomes increasingly important - if
you are making the icons & text larger, there is less room to display all of
them (to quote Jensen Harris -- "The result on a small monitor is that when
you enable large fonts, fewer controls can be labeled in the same amount of
space"). I see a similar problem when making places (as opposed to
programs) accessible - lengthy ramps are okay if you are in a wheelchair,
but horrible for people who walk with a cane.
One other thought - and that is people with coordination disorders (eg,
Parkinsons, cerebral palsy); small icons, as well icons tightly spaced, can
also be difficult for them to use because they are more likely to not click
in the right place. Obviously speech recognition helps significantly, but
an adaptable interface is also helpful. And Office 2007 is not adaptable.
If you look at Microsoft's reasoning for accessibility in Office 2007, they
ignore adaptability. The ribbon is a place to put more stuff (whether or not
you ever use or can see it). The keyboard is great for those wanting to
memorize several hundred keyboard combinations (again, KeyTips aren't very
handy if you can't see the tiny letters). Nothing about how Office can be
customized to suit your needs, but a lot about how you can change to work
with Office.
So Office 2007 maybe accessible for some, but not for all.
Mike
Patrick Schmid said:
I am not an accessibility expert, but one who is participated in the Office
beta and she never complained about a lack of accessibility of the UI (she
did however find every single item that was not accessible via the keyboard
and got that fixed...)
Keep in mind that accessible users generally use adaptive technology with
their computers. There are screen readers, screen magnification,
Text-To-Speech, Voice recognition and alternative input devices. The
support of those technologies (which is btw completely invisible to
non-accessible users) is pretty good in Office 2007. In fact, the
accessibility issues in Office 2007 are mostly related to documents
themselves (although the current state is an improvement over Office
2003). For example, there are certain items in Word documents and PPT
presentations that are just not accessible and an accessible user will not
even know that they are there. For example in Word, text boxes and
paragraph frames are completely inaccessible.
In addition, the Windows High Contrast mode is also supported by Office.
To sum it up, accessibility is not dependent on whether you can customize
the UI, but it is much more dependent on the UI's support for adaptive
technology.
Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
Office 2007 RTM Issues:
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/80
Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR):
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/09/18/43
***
Customize Office 2007:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/customize
RibbonCustomizer Add-In:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer
OneNote 2007:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/onenote
***
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http://pschmid.net/blog/feed
