What do you do with Vista after hours?…

 

So Matt and James are busy testing their kit ready for their “Vista After hours” sessions at the roadshow.  Well, they’re they going to be demoing all of this stuff at the evening event.  They also have a Home Server appliance, some Sideshow devices, some of the latest hardware like the new gaming mice , presenter mice and keyboards too. There are a few spaces still available if you want to register.

We’re even going to give away a couple of copies of Vista Ultimate too, so you can go straight home and have a play…

Register at:

· 20th September, Manchester

· 25th September, Newcastle

· 27th September, Falkirk, Scotland

· 3rd October, London

Learning Word 2007 if you’re visually impaired

Sometimes I receive an email that stops me in my tracks and makes me realise that there is so many things I just haven’t considered about our software in my day job.  Denny works at Gateway For the Blind and is trying to get to grips with Word 2007:

“Being a totally blind person, I am struggling with learning Office 2007. After learning how to do many functions in 2003 using the keyboard exclusively, I find Office 2007 very confusing. I have Googled for keyboarding in Vista and Office 2007 only to find tutorials on how to perform various functions in these applications geared for a sighted person. I would love to see a tutorial on especially using Word 2007 exclusively with a keyboard. Do you know of any resources, or do you plan on covering something like that in the future? Thanks for any help.”

I had no idea which types of keyboard shortcuts would work with Word 2007.  I’ve been using several keyboard shortcuts since Windows 3.1 and they’re just part of my day job now (although Ctrl + Z – the Oops key – is the one I use the most often).  So I asked the office team – and got quite a detailed answer…

“If the customer needs to get work done right now he can use most of the keyboard commands he learned with Office 2003. Virtually all of the CTRL keystrokes work the same and most of the ALT key sequences that launched a dialog box from a menu work the same (the Ribbon apps go into legacy keyboard mode when you type an ALT key sequence that used a menu in Office 2003). For instance, in Word, if you press ALT + O + F you will get the Font dialog box.

At some point though he will want to learn to use the Ribbon in Office 2007. The shortest description I can give to a blind user on how to use the Ribbon via the keyboard is to press and release the ALT key which will put focus on the active tab in the Ribbon. After that, navigate the Ribbon much liked a tabbed dialog box — we deliberately designed keyboarding for the Ribbon to be much like a tabbed dialog. When he is navigating around the Ribbon his screen reader should read back the ALT key sequence for each control if he wants to learn them.

As for resources:

* Go to Help and search on “accessibility”. I got about 9 help topics, two of which were “Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Office Word” and “Use access keys from Office 2003 in Ribbon programs”.

* On the Office Online site I found this, which looks like a pretty good tutorial:

One last note: I don’t know what version of what screen reader the customer is using, but if he hasn’t upgraded to a new version this past year he will almost certainly want to do so. All of the major third party vendors have had to do some work to make their screen readers work well with Office 2007 and have released new versions of their products. If he is running an older version it probably won’t work well at all with Office 2007.”

So there’s quite a lot of things there if you know where to go – but it really made me stop and think that there’s a whole new layer of complexity for the visually impaired to deal with – something I just never think about when I’m waving my mouse about at random on the screen.  I hope that this goes some way to help Denny learn word 2007 so he can carry on giving support and training to other visually impaired Office users…