I agree with some of Alex's points. The ribbon is difficult to negotiate using Jaws because sometimes you tab around, sometimes you use the left and right arrows, other times you use the up and down arrows. I couldn't understand the layout - I imagine a normally sighted person could better understand how the different sub-choices are structured.
I struggled with the ribbon for a couple of months but finally had a breakthrough when I just gave up on trying to understand how it's visually laid out on the screen. Once I gave up trying to use the product like a sighted person, my life got a lot easier. It only took about two hours to figure out the keyboard shortcuts to all the normal places you need to go. Just memorize them, or alternatively, type them into your own help document and control f to find a note to yourself, and really now it doesn't matter how the ribbon organizes the commands.
In my case, I just learned the shortcuts to get to all the dialog boxes, also, I learned all the simple control + single letter of the alphabet or number commands that can make something left justified, centered, right justified, bold, italics, single spaced, double spaced, etc. There are a lot of simple shortcuts (many of the control + something shortcuts are I think the same as in previous versions).
The problem Gerald mentioned of Microsoft's strange default choices (I agree they are absurd) can be solved by changing the normal file. Jaws can bring you to this file, just set it up with the margins, font, line spacing etc. the way you like it and save it, then when you create a new blank document it will use this normal file as the basis. All of this is accessible with Jaws in my experience.
If there were good instructional material out there, the problem of working Word 2007 with Jaws would be much less. I struggled for a long time because the regular books on the market usually don't include keyboard ways to do things, they assume you prefer to use the mouse, whereas the educational materials you find for the blind aren't comprehensive, they mostly cover only pretty basic stuff. Capitalism at work...
Michael At 12:02 AM 5/23/2009, you wrote:
I'd be going seriously off topic if I listed everything. Boiled down, it's just got a totally different feel to it than previous versions of Office. I actually use Excel mostly and Word occasionally. I find the ribbon tool bar to be illogical and so different from the previous menus that it has been like learning a whole new piece of software. One example, used to be, if I wanted to rename a sheet in Excel, I'd go to the edit menu(Alt+e, get it? e for edit), arrow down to sheet submenu or hit h to jump right to it, right arrow and move down to rename or hit r. Now, you have to hit alt+h (which I still think of as help menu deep down), then o then r I think. Sorry, I'm at home and you can bet I don't have 07 here. That's just one example of how different the whole interface is. I'm having a hard time memorizing the new stuff and forgetting to use the old stuff. You find yourself using the context menu a lot where before you'd just zip on through the pull down menus. You can't even use the arrow keys the same in the ribbon. YOu have to use tab a lot so it acts like a cross between a weird menu and a dialog box but, you activate it with the alt key so you're totally thrown off. I'm sure the software itself works fine. I'm also sure the folks at Freedom Scientific did a good job making Jaws work well with it. I just didn't figure a learning curve into my calculations when my pc was upgraded. I've been using some incarnation of office since the 90's and it's been a smooth transition from one version to another every time until now. If I had lots of time to kil and didn't have deadlines and such to meet, I wouldn't mind near as much. And as for yelling at Microsoft, plenty of people have and in industries like journalism, education, and all sorts of disciplines like the medical field and research groups that use Office to draft up the information they share. Their answer is that the ribbon is here to stay as are all the automated features in Office. I haven't had experience with this yet but, apparently, in heavily formatted documents, Word tries to think for you and makes it nigh on impossible for you to take control of your own machine. If you're an ex Dos, unix, and vacs user like me, you like being in total control of what's going on with the computer and you tend to resent software that tries to second guess you and take steps accordingly while you pound your keyboard in vain to try and make it stop. It all boils down to Microsoft redesigning their Office Suite from the ground up to the point that users of prior versions are as lost as newbies in some instances. If they were going to do that, they should've renamed it Office the Next Generation /generation 2 or something to make a clear demarkation between the old and the new so people would've had a hint that something was up. Of course, that would've hurt sales because Microsoft Office is a recognized trademark and it's extremely popular. Any deviation from it would not be as well-received by returning customers which, seeing as how it's ubiquitous in white collar jobs, is a lot of people. Ok, this really got way way longer than I meant for it to. Very sorry. My last word on the subject, I promise.Alex
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