Office 2007: accessibility problems

[cellio]

The word came down from on high at work: Office 2007 is being pushed to our machines, no opt-out. (Yes, we're slow adopters. Big companies are often like that.) We've known this for months, so since I have to customize my environment for vision reasons, I asked a coworker who already had it to give my Windows theme a spin. The result was pretty terrible, so I sought help from the IT folks. Uncharacteristically for large-company IT departments, I got routed to someone who both cares and has a clue, so he's been experimenting for a while on my behalf. He had to consult Microsoft, but he finally sent me a screen shot asking if this was acceptable. It was, so I accepted the push at a time that he'd be available to talk me through the re-configuration.

Before I describe the horror that resulted, I need to explain my situation. None of the "accessible" Windows styles work well for me; they're all too harsh and, surprisingly, some of the fonts are too large (which means some apps just aren't going to work without horizontal scrolling). So, a few years ago when vision changes didn't give me any other choice, I manually set up a reverse-video theme that's somewhat gentler than white on black. (Yes, that's also why my journal style is like that. It's for me; LJ gives you the "style=mine" option to skip it.)

The big problem with Office 2007 out of the box is that, regardless of your color settings, it will give you large blocks of white and light blue GUI "window dressing" -- so in Outlook, for instance, my actual messages would be reverse-video per my theme, but there'd be three inches of harsh white stuff at the top of the window and half an inch all around, and that bombardment of bright white pixels made it extremely difficult for me to read the contents of the window. This is the problem that got escalated to Microsoft, and they had an answer.

To get Office 2007 to honor my Windows theme, I merely had to do the following: in Control Panel go to the accessibility settings, display tab, and check "high contrast". This resets the theme to one of those white-on-black options I couldn't work with. Take it anyway. Then, back on the Control Panel, go to the display settings, find my theme, and set it to get my colors back. This sets a theme "on top" of another theme, and somehow that's different. The harsh white/light-blue stuff went away. Yay. (I do not feel the least bit bad for not figuring that out on my own.)

Alas, this has side-effects. You know how practically every PowerPoint presentation ever made uses some sort of stationery for the slide background? You know how most of those are white? Before, I'd get some dark text color (actually dark blue, not black), so while the non-reverse video was annoying, at least I could read the slides. Now, however, there's a new theme in town, and it helpfully makes the text light tan for me. On the white background. The same thing happens with the drop-down menus on our main (internal) corporate web site, the one we all have to use: white background, tan text. (Somebody has forgotten rule #1 of text rendering: set both or neither of foreground and background!) Some web sites also lose important subsets of their content like navigation links (presumably they're there but invisible). There are other effects too. This was clearly not going to work.

I've had a lot of discussions with the IT guy about how to fix this. He agrees that this is unacceptable, but there seems to be no way to make Windows, Office 2007, and my accessibility settings play well together. So tomorrow morning we will restore Office 2003 (with luck the fact that I received 2007 once will keep the auto-push from coming around again), and he will begin the approval process to get me set up with a virtual machine. In which I will run Office 2007, because sometimes I'm going to need that. Using a different theme, probably, because I won't have to live in it, just visit it from time to time, so it's allowed to kind of suck. Eventually maybe we'll figure out the right juju to make things work for real, but meanwhile, I'll keep using Outlook 2003 (the Office application I use the most and really need to work) outside the VM and, as needed, Office 2007 inside it.

I don't understand the design intent of the various settings in Windows. If I had a model for what things are intended to do maybe I could find a path to a workable color theme, but I haven't been able to derive that model despite years of using Windows. This business with layered themes with the "superseded" one still having unpredictable results completely confuses me. I find myself wondering whether Microsoft employs anyone with my kind of vision problems and, if so, how I could arrange to have a conversation with that person to learn how he gets around.

Comments

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, I'll be in Pittsburgh for Carnival again this year. Have they officially banned me from coming back yet, or should I drop by for lunch on Friday (2010.04.16)?

[cellio]

I'm not aware of a ban. :-) Cool! I'll alert the masses. I would enjoy seeing you again.