[Accessibility_sig] FW: Windows Vista and Office 2007 Notes

[Moore, Michael]

Good info regarding assistive technologies and upcoming changes from
microsoft.  See below. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Steinkamp, Joe 
Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 9:09 AM

Hi all. 

I am presenting an overview today of Vista and Office 2007 to BT&D. So I
wrote up something special and a little more Steve Ellisish, non techy,
friendly for the occasion. My sincere thanks go out to Vanessa for being
my translator on this little item as me, spelling and a half pot of
coffee are a dangerous combination. Feel free to edit or add to this in
your Field Offices during those times when you get questions from others
about Vista and Office. Also remember that my NFB presentation, slightly
more techy, is on the Utility Disc or on my blog at:

http://therangerstation.blogspot.com/2006/07/windows-vista-and-office-20
07-overview.html

Windows Vista and Office 2007 Notes

How did we arrive here?

Windows Vista has been in development for a little more than five years.
Its original release was planned for 2003. And some might also remember
Vista in its more UT friendly codename of Windows Longhorn. Just as a
side note this name actually came from a place called the Longhorn Inn
which is located near the Microsoft HQ rather than Bill Gates' possible
love for a particular University. The name Vista did not arrive until
early 2005. 

Vista's roadmap was massive in its original concept of development. Many
people from within Microsoft now admit that Vista's reach exceeded its
grasp which resulted at one point in the scrapping of two years of base
code in order to get the project back on track. Several of its proposed
features had to be scaled down or removed completely over the years. The
majority of these features were more big business friendly than consumer
oriented in nature. But even as the idea of Vista was forming the hard
line from Microsoft has been that the new operating system would arrive
on the rescheduled date of 2004 and then 2005. 

As we now know that sort of did not happen according to plan. However
the extra time that has been taken to develop Vista over the years has
actually benefited our consumers. We have enjoyed a five year span of
stability in Windows. This in turn provided us a five year span of
stability, of sorts, for Assistive Technology. It was a golden era never
to be seen again. 

The wonderful silver lining of this era has now dimmed to reveal the
very large dark cloud on the horizon. And this cloud is now approaching
us and our consumers at an alarming rate as Vista is finally, actually
and really being released as early as November 2006 for Enterprise
Volume License Customers and January 2007 for everyone else. 

Why is Vista So Scary for Us?

>From the DBS standpoint Vista represents something that we have never
come across before in our years of assisting consumers with their
technology concerns. Vista is essentially a ground zero restart of the
technology we use daily for entertainment and work tasks. When we made
the jump from DOS to Windows 95 the safety factor for the Assistive
Technology Venders, from this point on they will be referred to as ATVs,
was that DOS was the code that actually drove the Windows 95 operating
system. This trend continued from 95 to 98 to 98 Second Edition and
finally it was sort of removed from Windows ME in 2000-01. The ATVs did
not have to change their programs beyond their original foundations from
the early days of DOS. With the launch of Windows XP we saw that the
Assistive Technology industry had to rethink their programs a bit from
their DOS origins because XP no longer used DOS in the basic operations
of the program. There was a 6 to 10 month gap in the support of XP by
some in the industry as a result of this change. Some said it was a
budget and R&D issue while others said that they would have to wait for
the customer base to grow large enough to make a release viable for the
mass consumption of their product. In either case some job retention
consumers were placed in peril if their work sites adopted XP in its
launch phase. But even when the support did arrive Windows XP felt and
acted like Windows 98. Or at least you could modify XP to resemble 98
without losing features that came with the Windows XP Desktop Scheme. 

Windows Vista's problems are two fold. On one hand we have the issue of
code. The old ways of tricking Windows into letting us adapt it for the
blind and physically handicapped are gone. The Assistive Technology
industry as a whole was openly invited to Microsoft's Main Campus on
several occasions for a series of technology summits. During these
meetings most of the industry expressed concern or outwardly resisted
the changes that were proposed for vista. The ATVs stated that they did
not wish to change the ways that their programs worked in XP and that by
doing these changes they would have to rebuild their programs from the
ground up. G.W. Micro was one of the only companies to embrace
Microsoft's changes and as a result they are far ahead of the curve in
Windows Vista Accessibility. To Microsoft's credit they offered grants,
development assistance and technical knowledge to accelerate the move to
the Vista model now known as the Mirror Driver system. Even with these
carrots on the table the industry was able to use the stick on Bill
Gates because of Vista's constant back sliding of its release date. So
what we have now is an industry in overdrive, some with two development
teams working at the same time trying their best to have product ready
for the day and date of Vista's upcoming release. All of the ATVs have
pledged that they will have a solution ready by launch but the question
remains as to the quality of this first generation of Vista ready
applications. 

What we face in the next 9 to 12 months is a bit daunting. We will have
consumers and employers adopting Vista faster than XP because a main
selling point of Vista is security of your data. I have been told by one
ATV that the Social Security offices will move to Vista on April 1st if
Vista releases on time. The quick ramp up to Vista and the reactions of
the Assistive Technology industry will make things difficult from the
trouble shooting perspective. We will be dealing with a new operating
system that looks and acts like nothing we have used before with
Assistive Technology that is hot out of the oven. It will take some
considerable time for us to learn what is a bug of Vista, what is a bug
of Assistive Technology and what is not a bug but an actual feature of
the program [or "It's meant to work like that?]. And all along the line
we will still be supporting Windows XP and their current generation of
AT products. 

For example we are looking at supporting these products at the same time
for at least the next 18 months after the launch of Vista.

JAWS 7.1- Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP Home Sp2,
Windows XP Pro SP2, Windows XP media Center Edition 2005 Windows Server
2003 JAWS 8.0- Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Premium, Windows
Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista ultimate
Edition, Windows XP Pro SP2, Windows XP Home SP2, Windows 2000, Windows
Media Center 2005, Windows Server 2003

You may have noticed the second issue of the two problems I mentioned
above when reading the lists of Windows. Vista just isn't Home or Pro.
No Vista comes in 5 varieties and each one is very different from the
other in the types of customer and feature set offered. And each one can
be upgraded via the internet at will. So if a consumer was given a Home
Basic version of Vista and he needed the Ultimate Edition for a
particular feature he can upgrade to that version with a credit card and
the net. This may or may not disable his JAWS if Freedom Scientific
continues with the two tiered pricing system business model they use
today.  

Better yet one will have to keep straight which features work in which
version of Windows in regards to the job that the consumer is doing.
Most consumers will not need the complexities of the Ultimate Edition,
however, we as Specialists will have to know that the consumer's job
requires the purchase of Ultimate in order for the consumer to create or
operate some types of multimedia presentations. 

To make matters a bit worse Vista has several ways of presenting the
desktop that are new to us. And if one just says "no" and goes back to
the Windows Classic look of Windows 2000 they will, for the first time,
not have access to features of the operating system that their sighted
counterparts can use to be more productive. An example of this is the
Windows Sidebar. 

The Sidebar is a tool that runs down the left or right side of the
computer monitor. On this bar you can have Gadgets, neat name for
shortcuts, to small programs. You can have a battery meter, a live
broadcast of a baseball game, a stock ticker and a live weather radar
all running at the same time on the same toolbar. Clicking or placing
focus on a particular item will maximize the item over whatever you are
doing in the background. And changing focus will place the item back
onto the toolbar. It has been said by Microsoft that some businesses
could use this tool to send real time information on company events such
as document availability to a quick message about doughnuts being in the
break room. If a consumer wishes to avoid the more visual aspects of the
program they may be shutting themselves off from information that will
be commonly distributed by their sighted co-workers. And in some cases
the company may not even allow their employees to have access to these
Classic views as Vista allows IT departments to lock out many functions
of the operating system to the base user. 

Is there anything good to come of all of this?

As bad as I make Vista sound it actually has many features that can
assist us in VR and IL. The term "Active Accessibility" has been dropped
in favor of "Ease of Access". Along with this change come some new
versions of old friends and some new inclusions to the familiar built in
tools of Windows Accessibility. 

Narrator is much improved in both its sound and its operation. It's
still no replacement for a dedicated Screen Reader product nor was it
designed for such a task. Narrator does however provide a great option
for those times when your Screen Reader just doesn't seem to work and
you have to use something to trouble shoot your system. 

The Windows Magnifier offers some font smoothing like those features
found in the current version of Zoom Text. It too is no replacement for
a Screen Magnifier but for some low level magnification users it may
just be the right tool with fewer strings attached. You even have the
ability to make the cursor larger or thicker which will aid so many
consumers with Macular Degeneration as it can serve as a stopgap measure
until a technical evaluation can be performed.

One of the new editions to Vista Access is Speech Recognition. This
again is no replacement for a program like Dragon Professional but it
too may give our consumers a brief ability to use the system in a crisis
of job retention. It may also be a great tool for showing consumers just
how well this technology does and does not work for the type of
vocational goal they wish to achieve. 

So Vista is not all bad. It's just more complicated and diverse. And so
much more flexible. Having this many options at one time will be the
focus of the learning of the operating system for us. Knowing which tool
to be used for the right job just got a bit harder but in the long run
it is going to be manageable. Plus as more people buy new computers with
Vista the ATVs support will exponentially grow to meet the demand. The
launch cycle, however, will be rocky and some hard choices by VRC and
consumer alike will come up undoubtedly. 

"You gave me Windows Vista ____. I need the Ultimate Edition because
____."
"The system you gave me a year ago is not what I need. I want Vista
because ___."
"I need JAWS 8 because it has support for ____. But I have a Windows 98
computer..."

One more thing!

The hardest part about the jump from Windows XP, or older, to Vista for
our consumers will be the time and depth of training needed to maximize
the potential of the equipment on the job. We estimate 10 hours of
refresher training per consumer at the intermediate level. And this is a
general guide for basic Windows concepts. Advanced features such as
setting up a Windows Vista laptop to share a Power Point presentation
via a wireless connection to any other Vista enabled laptops within a 30
foot radius may take a little longer to teach. As they say "it's all
relative". 

Office 2007

Having five versions of an operating system wasn't enough for Microsoft.
Office 2007 comes in no less than 6 configurations with various pricing
options. But you have to be saying to yourself that it's just Office.
How could they make MS Word more complicated? Well if you read below you
will find out just how this was achieved. 

Microsoft Office 2007 radically alters the way that you interact with
productivity software. And unlike Windows Vista there is no Classic
View. This means that you don't have too many options open if you don't
like the general look and feel of the new program. 

The changes are all centered on the new Office User Interface called
"The Ribbon". This Ribbon resembles non-visually as one long dialog box
that covers the top two to three inches of the screen. It has tabs like
a dialog box. And its options change depending on the tab you're sitting
on at the moment. What is new is the fact that more tabs can be added as
you progress through the creation of a document. 

Say you're in a Word document and you want to add a table. You would
change focus or click the "Insert" tab. then you would select "Table"
from the buttons listed, visually from left to right, in what's called
the "Gallery" of options under the Insert Tab. Once done you now have a
"Table" tab added in the row of tabs near where you chose "Insert" a
moment ago. Clicking or changing focus to the "Table" tab will now
present you once again with a row of options of the types of tables
available to you for the type of document you are creating. 

So you may now be thinking that's why they created hotkeys and
application menus. And you would be right. If you were in Office 2003
that is. In Office 2007 the context menus are directly affected by the
type of item you are working in or where your cursor's focus is within
that document. 

Let's go back to the table example. If you want to right click or use
the application key in the text of a Word Document you will find the
regular lot of Cut, Copy, Paste and other font enhancements. But
changing the table's text or other aspects will require you to place
your focus back into the table as the options have now changed to meet
your table making desires. 

>From the visual perspective this is fantastic. A person can hover over a
control with their mouse and see if Arial Black at 18 point font will
mess up the printing of a document without actually making changes to
that document. Real time snapshots of changes stay on the screen as long
as the mouse pointer hovers directly over the button shown in the
Gallery. No more do you have to make your way through five steps of a
menu to make a change and then 10 steps back to undo said changes. And
again visually this is a wonderful improvement on document creation. 

Screen Magnifier users do have it a bit worse than Screen Reader users
however. A Screen Magnifier user by default can not see the whole
display by default of the technology. But now they can not take
advantage of some of these real time features of Office 2007 because the
portion of the screen that is magnified does not always contain part of
the document being altered via the Gallery controls. So you can see that
your pointer is on the Verdana font but you are so zoomed in on the
button at 5x that you can't actually see the changes you made to the
document on the fly. Instead you have to make the changes then pan down
to see them. This takes a bit more time. It's not that it isn't
accessible. But it does require that the user recognize that there will
always be controls, options and information being displayed just beyond
the fields of the Screen Magnifier. Also when it comes to training
someone on these tools special care must be given to navigating the
screen layout as all controls of Office 2007 can be customized. You can
pin a particular and often used template or macro to the Ribbon. This
means you don't have to hunt down that advanced feature over and over
again but you do need to realize where it is on your "Home" tab. And if
you're constantly adding to the "Home" tab the placement of your buttons
may change to better fit all the buttons in the Gallery. 

The Rock and The Hard Place

The major concern about Office 2007 is that we are far more likely to
encounter this program suite in the field in relation to the adoption of
Windows Vista. Office 2007 does not have the considerable problems of
upgrading a computer to meet Windows Vista standards. In fact Office is
more open to a wider install base of older computer systems. And it will
be the only version of Office on the shelf when the Class of 07 walks
across the stage this Spring. 

The learning curve for Office is mostly dependant upon the needs of the
consumer. Not every program within Office uses the Ribbon interface. But
in many ways the older interfaces have more options open to them making
advanced training just as complicated as using the Ribbon interface.
Outlook, Power Point, Share Point and InfoPath will take longer to learn
even if you are fairly knowledgeable in 2003 terms. Excel, Access and
Word vary on the amount of training needed as it too is directly tied to
the types of tasks being taught. ATU is estimating 20 hours of refresher
training per application for intermediate users who are converting from
older versions of Office to Office 2007.