Accessibility Begets Usability

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re: Accessibility Begets Usability

PatriotB — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:46:27 GMT

"And the edit control in the file open/save dialog doesn't have a context menu (WHY?)"

Because Office doesn't use the standard Windows open/save dialogs. (Evidently they aren't "good enough" for Office.)

Of course that means that you get inconsistencies/annoyances such as this. As well as those pointed out by the following commenters:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/02/488163.aspx#488260
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/02/488163.aspx#488326

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

Blake Handler — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:14:07 GMT

In an attempt to get us back “on topic”. . .

The idea that designing software for people of all “abilities” benefits people of ALL abilities, simply makes sense. Which is another reason I truly hope “they” solve the problems of speech generation & recognition for the blind. :-)

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

BradC — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:57:23 GMT

JM-

I know EXACTLY what you're talking about. I did the same thing the first time I saw this happen (in front of a class full of students, no less!!), and here's how to fix it:

Just click the email button again (next to save on the toolbar), and the "sending email mode" toggles back off. The extra toolbar, plus the To, CC, and Subject boxes disappear.

This is especially annoying when you've activated the feature from File, Send, but can't UNactivate it from there.

That said, it is actually a pretty cool feature. Have a short document in Word that you want to send someone? A note or memo? Just send with the message AS the body, instead of having to save and attach a Word doc. Small table of sales figures in Excel? Send it AS the email, instead of ATTACHED to the email.

Makes it much easier to send information that you otherwise would either attach or copy and paste into the email.

It should send in fully compatable html format, so that anyone can read it, whether they have Office or not.

One more cool feature: do this in Excel, and you can send a spreadsheet as the message body. Then the end-user can either just read and respond, or they can actually right-click the table portion of the email to open the spreadsheet back up in Excel!! Very cool feature, and even retains the formulas that existed in cells (if I recall correctly).

Hope this helps.

Brad

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

jensenh — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 04:30:05 GMT

Alan:

We support large fonts by increasing the size of the ribbon vertically to accomodate the larger size of the text. Horizontally, our scaling mechanism comes into play and the Ribbon figures out which chunks fit onto the screen in which configurations.

The result on a small monitor is that when you enable large fonts, fewer controls can be labeled in the same amount of space.

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

jensenh — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 04:06:41 GMT

JM,

Sorry you're having trouble with Office 2003. I tried to replicate some of the things you mention having trouble with but they seem to work fine for me. (For instance, I just click the red Close X in the e-mail message brought up from Excel and it cancels just fine.)

Other things, like the Close button and Exit being grayed out I also can't replicate. The context menu in the file dialog is a good issue and one which looks to be fixed in Office 12.

Wish I could shine more light on what's going on with your other issues!

That said, I'm not qualified to do tech support here on my blog (and don't really know any more about most of these features than you do.) In the future I will remove any comments that are totally unrelated to the post being commented on.

The MS Support web site http://support.microsoft.com/ links to a lot of resources for troubleshooting problems, including the support newsgroups where it's often quick and easy to get the answer to your question from an MVP or employee in the exact area you're interested in.

Your general point about making the product more predictable in general is well-taken and is in line with my values on the subject as well.

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

jensenh — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 03:39:48 GMT

Will:

I think the answer to your question can be found here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/30/475687.aspx

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

JM — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:19:51 GMT

P.S. Of course this wasn't an appropriate place for that rant. I don't suppose Jensen Harris liked finding that rant there any more than I like finding my files in "My Documents" on days when I forget that Office is incapable of persisting the working directory.

The point of the bogus email address was that I didn't want to spam the contemplated recipient with some broken pseudo-spreadsheet when he wanted the real one. Instead, I sent it to myself out of curiosity, and sure enough, it sent me HTML crap instead of a spreadsheet. Without warning, of course. No warning at all that the data being sent was a HTML "picture" of what I actually told it to send. Had I been naive enough to trust Office, it would have really screwed me.

Thanks, guys. Your product treats me like the enemy.

re: Accessibility Begets Usability

JM — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:09:11 GMT

I just made the very serious mistake of choosing "Send To Email Recipient" from the File menu in Excel 2003. Turns out that feature seems not to attach it to new mail; it looks like it's creating some kind of bizarre OLE-embedded message monstrosity, probably never viewable outside of Outlook -- whatever it is, it's not what anybody would expect and I have no reason to imagine that it's what I want, so let's cancel out of there, okay?

Five minutes later, I still can't figure out how to cancel out of it. If I try the usual MDI "close MDI child" button, it prompts me about saving changes to the file. I don't want to close the file, I want to kill the stupid toolbar, but I'll re-open the file if that's what it takes. Is it still an Excel file? Will it be saved as RTF or some madness? Who knows? Ten to one it's going to lose my data or hide it somewhere, because Office compulsively thinks it knows better than I do where my files belong -- but what other option do I have? Okay, so I tell it to save and exit. But I opened the file from an Outlook attachment. Now I want my changes back. Where did my changed file go? It's not on the MRU menu. If I open the same attachment, I get a "(2)" after the name, and it's the original, pre-change version.

I'll have to go searching in "My Documents", because Microsoft thinks I should save absolutely every file I edit in that one directory (which is perfectly insane).

I should have left the office over an hour ago.

Please don't inflict miseries like this on your users in the future. If a command puts the program into a weird, annoying, and useless state, the user should in most cases be able to cancel out of it. Sending an email is the kind of activity the user should ALWAYS be able to cancel out of.

And what in God's name is up with Office 2003 disabling the Exit button in the title bar and Close on the system menu?

I'm encouraged by the talk about the Office giving up on all the attempts to guess what the user wants, like the Adaptively Unpredictable Menus and whatnot, but Office has been such an ever-worsening mess for so long, I'm not optimistic.

Hey, wait a minute! I just found my Excel file, opened it, and it still has the email header garbage on it! Why is that a state that must persist across sessions? Why did you do this to me? WHY? In version 12, please put a confirm prompt on the destroy-spreadsheet-as-email menu item saying "WARNING: This command will add a giant annoying extra toolbar, and the only way to get rid of it (restarting won't help!) is to send a useless email message to a bogus address. Continue? [Yes][No]" That would be very helpful.

It sent me a ridiculous HTML version of the file, in which the string "style='border-top:none;border-left:none'" appears 255 times. Two hundred and fifty-five. I guess they used the single-quotes to save space, right? Get it? That was supposed to be funny.

I usually don't hate Microsoft. Windows works fine and I've been very happy with DevStudio since v5. But every time I go near Office, I end up wanting to bomb Redmond, because the last thing Office ever, ever does, is what I tell it to. And the edit control in the file open/save dialog doesn't have a context menu (WHY?) Little things like that, where you get the feeling they stayed up late thinking about small ways to violate the user's expectations, just to crank up the misery level that much more.