Sara, Let me just say that I am encouraged by this thread. I would dearly love to see the Office suite become accessible on the Mac, for more than just being able to create documents for use by most of people who I communicate with on a daily basis.
In 2009 the NFB won a federal suit against the SSA for noncompliance of section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Unfortunately the judge in his ruling stated that the SSA is now required to provide all documentation in either an audible format, braille format, or Word format. Great for Microsoft but not so much for those of us who don't have access to Word. For the purposes of full disclosure I will say that I am aware of this because I currently work for the company that is subcontracted to the NTIS. We provide all the braille and word documents for SSA. I have met with the directors of the SSA and made the case to them that Word documents are not accessible on the Mac versions of Office, and translating them to Pages or other formats is not always guaranteed. Their response was that they are providing only what the judgment requires them to and no more. So my hopes are high that an accessible version of Office is in the works, as I will no longer pay for an operating system that does not have a built in screen reader that is functional. Regards, Keith Watson 813-760-1381 tkwatso...@gmail.com Twitter: @TKeithWatson On Feb 1, 2013, at 12:59 PM, SaraFord <saraf...@microsoft.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > Thank you J.P. for starting this thread and for inviting me to the group! My > name is Sara Ford. I’m a Program Manager on the Office for Mac team. Since I > recently joined the Office for Mac team, I asked J.P. to describe his > experiences. Previously at Microsoft, I worked on Accessibility for Visual > Studio, the Windows equivalent of Xcode for writing software applications, > using JAWS and Window Eyes. Thank you for sharing your stories with me. > > Thanks, > -sara > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
