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Re: Are there major accessibility issues in Word, PowerPoint & Outlook

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From: glen walker
Date: Nov 1, 2019 9:08AM

I still use an older version of PPT (2016) and I treat it as an authoring
tool (ATAG). There is no way to mark images as decorative in the 2016
version but the 2019 version allows it.

PPT forces you (the user) to keep track of the reading order. The order
that objects are created on the slide is the reading order. It would be
really nice if PPT had an option to allow PPT to keep track of the reading
order as left to right, top to bottom. Sometimes you don't want that order
but the majority of the time that order would be correct. Forcing the user
to manually create that order is ridiculous. Making and deleting objects
and then moving them around is very common. Having to manually order the
objects is just stupid. Doing it for one slide is a pain, let alone for
30, 50, or 100 slides in just one presentation, and then if you make lots
of presentations, you'd spend most of your time ordering objects instead of
creating content. It's a huge failure by Microsoft.

Yes, I'm a bit testy about this particular subject. I have a 150 slide
slidedeck for teaching WCAG (details of all 50 AA success criteria) and I'm
always updating it with new examples (good and bad) and have to always
adjust the reading order to keep the slides accessible. It's a big waste
of time. Not a waste of time to make it accessible, it's a waste of time
that PPT won't do it for you. It's easy to do, programmatically. I've
written an object-oriented system before that kept track of the default tab
order (essentially the reading order) when creating objects, moving them
around, resizing, deleting, re-parenting, etc. It's absolutely doable and
is a significant failure by the PPT product team to ignore such a feature
when Microsoft says they focus on accessibility.

Now, again, I'm using Office 2016, so maybe they fixed this problem in 2019
or Office 365, so I can calm down. Would love to know if anyone has seen
if this is fixed in the latest version.