Microsoft Backtracks On Accessibility In Windows Phone 7

beetle496 writes "One of the things Microsoft has done well for many years now (since they got called on the carpet about Windows 95) is providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind. Their current push is for a set of APIs called User Automation. Many of us in the field have remained skeptical of the early promises, especially those related to cross-platform compatibility. The news that Microsoft is now backtracking is disappointing, but hardly surprising. It looks like IAccessible2 is the way to go."

Comments

hacked on

[fermion]

One reason MS Windows got called on the carpet was that so many things were hacked on and bloated., Recall that MS Windows could not change screen setting without a reboot. They added that feature but also other less useful things. When hacking on security MS fought between making users machines accessible to legitimate third parties and keeping it secure from less legitimate third parties. In the end, since security wasn`t designed into the product, security for all intents and purposes did not exist.

Accessibility has to be designed in. It is like multiple language capability in software. With the right design, it is easy. With the wrong design one will always have little places where words are not properly transited. If MS did not design accessibility into the basics of MS Windows 7,if they have to design it in after the fact, they lost an incredible opportunity.

Re:I love self-contradicting summaries.

[PhrostyMcByte]

I've got a Winphone7 phone and I develop apps for it, so take this as you want.

I don't see why anyone with an interest in Winphone7 would be surprised. Especially a developer. Microsoft has stated numerous times that the current Winphone7 is an early, bare-minimum release, and that they'll be bringing out major updates in 2011 to bring feature parity (both on the user and developer sides) with other smart phones. I'm sure accessibility features are on their list of improvements.

The "providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind." comes across as a guilt trip to me, because it implies they singled out that industry when they finally broke compatibility. They didn't. On Winphone7, you develop for a mostly-Silverlight-but-sometimes-not platform using .NET. This broke compatibility with ALL old apps that ran on Winmo6.5, not just accessibility ones.

Accessibility may be one of the tougher problems to solve, as their current interface was designed from the ground up to be touch-centric. You pan around the screen than I've seen in any other phone. The OS does have pretty good voice recognition baked in -- it'll probably be the easiest thing to get working for everything. Letting people zoom in could also help, but the standard widgets and Visual Studio templates don't re-flow well to aspect ratios, so you'll have to pan twice (once between pages and once over the current page), which could get cumbersome.

Re:Blind people using a touchscreen?

[das_io]

You can use an iPhone with VoiceOver with the screen completely turned off and there are really blind enthusiastic users (this one was from Mozillas accessibility QA).

Give credit where it isn't due?

[FullBandwidth]

I had to laugh when I saw Microsoft described as "doing well" in terms of accessibility for the blind. It's simply not true; their attempts at accessibility are token at best and largely ignored by the blind community. I know lots of blind people and I don't know a single one who uses a Windows desktop or mobile product without a third-party application such as JAWS for Windows, ZoomText or Nuance. Oh and while we're on the subject: Adobe's accessibility "features" are non-functional - not only are they totally inadequate standing alone, they also prevent those 3rd party applications from doing their jobs. PDFs and Flash are pretty much inaccessible to blind users. I am holding out hope for Pico on Android ... though I have yet to get it working on anything but the emulator that comes with the SDK.