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

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Nov 1, 2019 10:35AM


By creating the order, are you talking about adding each object
individually? Since O13, you can go home > arrange > selection pane. In
O13, you have to use the up/down arrows provided to adjust. In O365, you
can draw and drop. One critical thing is the order is from the BOTTOM to
top. Only reason I can think they did this is to be backwards compatible
with 2003 and prior back when it was added in 2007 or 2010.

--
Ryan E. Benson


On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 11:08 AM glen walker < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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.
> > > > >