bad software design

[cellio]

Yet another reason that I would leave (or decline) a job that requires substantial Word usage: accessibility.

In my experience, MS Office utterly fails when it comes to accessibility issues. (Or if it doesn't and there are work-arounds, I sure can't find them in the documentation -- which is a different type of failure.) Today's problem: highlighting. When you use the highlighter in Word, it hard-wires whatever color you chose into the document (bright yellow, by default). That's illegible to someone using reverse-video, and there's no way to globally change it in a document. The correct way to do this sort of thing is to have semantic concepts like "highligher color" (1, 2, 3...), and embed that into the Word doc. Then, on the client end, you define your color map. Voila -- everything works. It'd be like system colors, except they'd work. You get your yellow; I get dark blue. For extra points, use the system settings directly for as much as possible; "selection color" probably works fine for highlighting, for instance.

It's not just highlighting in Word; Outlook pays attention to your system colors for some things but not others, so there are things in the UI I just can't see. (I'm told there's supposed to be a status line that tells me about my server connection; could've fooled me.) I frequently get Office documents where some accident changed "automatic color" to black, and I have to select everything and change it back.

This problem is not unique to Office; Microsoft's IM client does the same thing with text color. Your outgoing messages have a hard-wired text color, which might or might not work for the recipient. I have to highlight most coworkers' messaages to read them (they come in as black on my dark background), and they have to do the same for mine (which are white so I can see them as I type). Text color should be set for a user, not for outgoing messages. I want to see everything in white; you want to see everything in black. Half of our conversation shouldn't be wrong for each of us.

These products, like many web sites, tend to specify half of the foreground/background-color pair. If you're going to hard-wire yellow highlighting, you'd better also hard-wire black text. If you're going to hard-wire black IM text, you'd better also hard-wire a light background. But you shouldn't hard-wire either most of the time; you should ask the OS.

MS offers accessibility options in Windows, but it's a sham -- try to use them and you'll bump into stuff like this all the time. Theirs aren't the only products with these problems, but they are the ones who have no excuse for getting this wrong.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

brynndragon runs her Windows in white-on-black, and runs into this all the time with webpages that use fg or bg colors but not both. I've become convinced that the problem is actually with how Windows implements white on black.

If I want white-on-black on my Mac, I press ctrl-opt-cmd-8, and everything inverts (including the colors, which is odd) across all apps and windows. Now my viewing preferences don't have to impact what colors are in the document, which may have legitimate reasons for being that way. (E.g., printing white on black is awful. Highlighting yellow on white-on-black text is less useful than on black-on-white.) But Windows appears to be too smart by half, inverting some of the text and not other bits. The fact that they can't even get it right with their flagship app really drives home how broken the OS's half-solution is.

I wonder for you -- is there an aftermarket Windows app that would do the color inversion, and perhaps do a better job than the built-in setting?

[cellio]

I don't actually use white-on-black; that's a little too harsh for me. (The IM client, though, has only a limited palette of colors, hence the white text there.) My text is tan and my background is dark brown, which seems to give me enough phosphers for readability without bombarding my eyes with light. So I don't want true color inversion, but I would be willing to sit down and define my own color map if I had to.

Windows offers custom color settings, so you can define text, window background, titlebar color, border color, select color, and a bunch of other things. It's remarkably tedious to get right, but I've put the time in to get that mostly working. However, none of that does any good if applications don't pay attention to those settings. That Microsoft's own applications don't, completely, is grating. I should go looking for an aftermarket app; thanks for the suggestion!

There are a lot of badly-done web pages out there (in this regard -- also other regards, but that's tangential). My mostly-solution is Firefox's Stylish extension, which lets me define CSS overrides either globally or per-site. (And I can turn them on and off at will.) This is not a perfect solution, but it's better than anything else I've come up with.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

I generally don't use highlight. Background shades and/or text formatting tend to work as well as (if not better). If you want someone to see changes, just turn on Track Changes (which displays based on the viewer's settings).

S

[cellio]

Well, the background shades can be problematic too; we had some docs floating around that used 5% gray as background for code samples, but didn't specify text color. That didn't work either, but fortunately I was able to hunt down and eradicate the offending SLT. There's a difference: I was able to fix that problem globally. Word doesn't give me that option.

(By the way, other companies that ought to know better get this sort of thing wrong, too. The standard Javadoc doclet specifies white backgrounds but not text color -- a reversal of the usual problem, but equally bad. Fortunately, they do it via CSS, so I've written a build target to insert my own style sheet into my builds.)

In the case that prompted this rant, someone was using highlighting to call out sections of a document that he thought needed attention, rather than using it for edit-tracking.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

Myself, I prefer to place comments in the document. Again, how that appears is determined by the viewer.

S

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I changed the default window background colour from glaring white to a slightly off-white (240,240,240). It was surprising how many applications simply ignored the system colours and used their own hardcoded ones.. and how many would be inconsistent.

Outlook Colors

[(Anonymous)]

I dont know much about older versions of Outlook (and Office in general). But in 2007, when you select windows to a high contrast color scheme, Office will start using many more of the system colors than its own color scheme. I tried setting windows the "High Contrast White", then changing the 3d Objects color back to a gray to stop myself from having to rip out my eyes. And office, turns gray, and uses system colors for most of its UI.