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Give us a Ribbon with tools we can use to make accessible document
I have spent the last year training our employees to use the toolbar
Microsoft *should* have created for Word 2003 -- one that features all the commands needed to create an accessible document and none of the commands that lead you away from creating an accessible document. Ironically, these commands are also essential to understanding the power of Word and using it as a 21st-century word processor, not the electronic equivalent of safety scissors, construction paper, a pot of paste, and an 8-pack of crayons. (That description fits the buttons featured on Microsoft's default toolbars.) Employees who use my accessibility toolbar not only create accessible documents painlessly but also take much, much less time to fix formatting problems. They also find that Word now behaves more consistently, as they are no longer sending it confusing combinations of commands. Now we are moving to Word 2007. We are struggling to create and deploy a ribbon that fits our business needs -- not one that takes half of its room advertising direct formatting that cannot be understood correctly by Word (in generating a document map or table of contents, for example) and cannot be interpreted at all by screen readers and other forms of assistive technology. We finally created the appropriate combination of buttons on a new tab, but quite often Word decides that we are finished using it and switches back to the all but useless Home tab. Please create a tab that prominently allows the user to open the document map, apply styles (*not* formatting), insert frames (*not* text boxes), add captions and alt text to illustrations, insert tables (*not* draw them), apply columns, add bookmarks and hyperlinks, and so forth. If a command misleads a screen reader or does not directly correspond to valid html, don't put it on this ribbon. And let me designate this tab, not the home tab, as my default ribbon. Along these lines, I have one more request about the document map: If the user has entered no structure, don't let Word guess. Make it show nothing but structure explicitly entered (through the outline level setting of an appropriate style) by the user. If all the have done is to fling formatting at the screen, the document map should display *nothing* -- because that's the same thing a screen reader would pick up. If you make this change, the document map will be a powerful tool for determining whether a screen reader can correctly perceive the structure of the document. As it is now, the document map confuses the heck out of everyone I have encountered who has not been specifically taught what it is supposed to do when Word isn't guessing. ---------------- This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then click "I Agree" in the message pane. http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...ocmanagemen t |
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