I posted the following message on the mailing list for blind or visually
impaired assistive technology trainers. I'm reposting it here, in case
it's of interest or relevance to any of you.
A while ago, I saw some discussion on this list regarding the
accessibility of the Outlook.com Web site with screen readers. I
decided to do some experimenting with the site and I am happy to report
that, at least for me, the site was extremely usable.
First, the screen reader that I used was NVDA, along with the firefox
browser. All of the links seem to be clearly labeled, including
navigating through the list of messages. The web site didn't seem to
use any Aria controls or tables and placing the message list in a table
would have made navigation a bit more convenient. However, since each
message has a checkbox associated with it, screen reader users can press
the letter x to navigate from one message to the next. This is also
true for window-eyes and for JAWS.
what really impressed me about Outlook.com is the fact that you can set
it up to receive email from other accounts. This is quite nice. Since
Verizon is my home Internet provider, I used to be able to go onto the
verizon.net Web site to access Web mail from other computers. A while
ago, this interface became totally inaccessible and I haven't had a
chance to contact verizon about this to report the issue. However, with
Outlook.com, I was able to go through the settings to add my verizon.net
email address as an Outlook.com account, allowing me to access my
account via a Webmail interface. Truth be told, this isn't really
crucial for me as I use portable email clients off of a thumb drive when
I'm on a computer that may not be set up with full accessibility. Since
I'm an NVDA user, I can use my thumb drive to run a portable copy of
NVDA, along with Seamonkey, which is currently the portable email client
I'm using. However, if you're a person or are working with a student for
whom this is not an ideal solution, helping them set up their email
account on Outlook.com may be a reasonable solution.
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Feel free to visit my LinkedIn profile at
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-goldfield/12/929/573
David Goldfield,
Founder and Peer Coordinator
Philadelphia Computer Users' Group for the Blind and Visually Impaired
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html
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