[clifftyll]

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.

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