1. nvda@nvda.groups.io

locked Re: publisher

Andy B.
 

This has everything to do with NVDA and add-ons. We are partially there already. Take a look at the add-on DTK found at www.github.com/ajborka/nvda_developer_toolkit. No, the sunset or specific colors will never be accessible in the traditional sense. However, the landscape arranged on the backdrop of a sunset can be made accessible in a traditional sense. A blind person can understand, or learn to understand the placement of objects on a landscape. Top, bottom, to the left of… to the right of… above, below, in front of… behind, height, and width. Microsoft already made this concept accessible in the traditional sense in PowerPoint. A blind person can successfully arrange shapes, graphs/charts, tables, textboxes, images, audio, and other visual media on the slides without much sighted intervention. Web/software design is becoming accessible both in the traditional and modern sense because of the DTK add-on. The next sentence strays from the subject, but I am sure Microsoft has the ability to work some code to make Publisher accessible to screen readers much like they did with PowerPoint, a highly visual tool. I will let the subject rest.

 

 

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

 

From: Brian Vogel
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2019 10:43 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] publisher

 

On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 10:23 PM, Andy B. wrote:

Someone should make this accessible.

Make what accessible?

Publisher files can be saved as, say, PDFs, and when done in that way they're somewhat more accessible.

Publisher is a desktop publishing program.  Text can be read.  I am trying to figure out what, exactly, accessible means in this context.

Just as it's impossible to make an oil painting accessible it's impossible to make certain aspects of things that directly rely on vision accessible.  Accessibility is, plain and simple, a workaround - always has been and always will be.   I have a very dear friend who's been blind since birth, and we both agree that, for certain things, there is no substitute for vision.  She understands things like colors as an abstract classification, but that doesn't mean that color can ever be accessible.  She understands that something having an image of a sunset as the background describes an image, and the sun, but she's never seen a sunrise or sunset and so that image cannot be accessible in any meaningful sense.

If one wants the final output from Publisher to be more accessible to a screen reader user that product would be saved in a file format that's meant for reading, not controlling layout, which is what Publisher's central purpose is.   It's a tool that does its task, which is very heavily visual in nature, as it needs to.

Unless you can get specific about what you mean by "accessible" for a tool that has as its primary purpose visual layout then I don't know what you mean, at all.
 
--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 1903, Build 18362  

The color of truth is grey.

           ~ André Gide

 

 

 
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