[access-uk] Why I hate Word - from a JAWS user

Microsoft Word is meant to be brilliantly accessible. And indeed you can
tell that Freedom Scientific have put a lot of work into it to make it
as accessible as possible, it being a fairly indispensible part of the
software port folio in your average office. 

Tables are accessible. You can increase font and change colours. You can
alter margins, add page numbers, use hyperlinks, there's a hundred
things you can do with it and they're all accessible. However, if you
aren't a mouse user and can't whizz your way across the screen and
appreciate the results once you've altered them, then it takes
absolutely blinking ages to read and create documents that your sighted
colleagues take minutes to create. 

Want to make your heading a bit bigger? And perhaps embolden it too?
Well if you're not too careful, you might accidentally do same to the
text below it in a last minute change of heart about the content.
Result: it looks embarrassingly rubbish. 

Create a bullet point list and find yourself playing around with it for
several minutes because you've got one too many bullet points and you
can't get rid of the unnecessary bullet, or Word decides it wants to
bullet point things that you didn't want. 

The best most accessible documents are the ones you create. You know
them, you know your way round them. But it's still difficult. The
documents that your colleagues like the most because they're 'at a
glance' user friendly, are the ones you find most difficult to access. 

Access to Word is a myth because it's so time consumingly unusable. 

When you launch Word it takes 20 seconds before a blank document opens,
longer if you're clicking on a pre-existing document. There's so much
lag and there's a lack of control that makes me want to scream. 

So that's why I use Metapad and .txt files for as much of my work as
possible, only transferring to Word if I need to spellcheck or format it
in a fancy way. It's faster, unbelievably faster. Or that's my finding. 

And yes, I have had Word training, I do understand how it works, but
there's so much darn pussyfooting around when creating documents that I
can't help but think there must  be a better way. 

That's all I wanted to say. Do have a nice day. Xxx 
























Damon Rose
Senior Content Producer bbc.co.uk/ouch 
BBC Vision Learning

Tel: 020 8752 4427 (x0224427)
email: damon.rose@xxxxxxxxx

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disability talk show presented by Mat Fraser and Liz Carr:
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