[Athen] ATHEN – Microsoft Meeting Notes – January Meeting

[Anita Mortaloni]

Hi ATHEN,

Thank you to everyone who was able to call into the ATHEN meeting last week and/or provide feedback on the scenarios.  The feedback this group gives is invaluable to us creating better products that everyone can use.  Below are meeting notes, action items and key dates. Very much looking forward to working with this group and getting your feedback!
Anita Mortaloni
ATHEN – Microsoft Meeting Notes – January Meeting
Action Items

  *   @Anita Mortaloni<mailto:anitase at microsoft.com> – Share list of Win10 items with Windows team, report back at next planned meeting
  *   ATHEN – continue feedback to MSFT

Upcoming Key Dates

  *   Feb 1: Agenda sent
  *   Feb 7 : Next monthly meeting

Meeting Notes
Below is feedback from the two scenarios discussed

Mac Word Scenarios/Feedback
Contact: Cathy Harley <cathyh at microsoft.com>

Thanks again for taking the time to so thoroughly test out accessibility on Mac Word. Your feedback is so helpful to identifying current usability issues and for improving our product in the future so that everyone can work more efficiently in Word.
Fixed!

  *   Alex, Michelle and Eric identified a keyboarding bug where focus was getting stuck inside of a shape—we’ve already fixed this and it should be available to customers at the end of January!  Thanks for your help finding this issue!

In Progress

  *   Heading property recognition and proper heading navigation in Word was our top piece of accessibility feedback from Office to Apple a year ago (which they were very receptive on). There have been very recent updates to their APIs in High Sierra that may allow Word to do work to amend the experience for our VoiceOver users, but we haven’t been able to fully investigate the impact of these yet. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a date commitment for when we’ll be able to show you progress here, but I can tell you that its an area we’re going to focus on this year.

  *   Alex provided feedback that commented text doesn’t give clear audio feedback to VoiceOver users. It is known that our comment annotation story is unfortunately quite weak.  Again, this is an area where we may potentially be able to make incremental improvements based on a very recent API improvement, but no timeline or commitments can be given to customers yet.

Great input for the future

  *   There was feedback about “format change interruptions. This is something that is on the platform. If anyone feels strongly against this behavior, please follow up and we can make sure to log a bug with Apple.
  *   Alex, Michelle and Eric list some other great keyboarding inconsistencies with space bar or enter in the Ribbon for inserting images and shapes. We’ve logged these issues.
  *   Alt keyboard shortcuts that make accessing the Ribbon fast and easy on Windows are a platform limitation on Mac.  The suggestion to add a tab stop here is quite interesting and something we can consider when we get bandwidth to tackle these problems. Please let us know if you have other ideas.
  *   Thank you for your valuable feedback on comment groupings—we’ll take this into careful consideration when we do work to improve comments in the future
  *   Navigating through objects on the page in an ideal order (comments, shapes, etc) has historically been quite difficult due to the nature of how VoiceOver communicates with out page layout. If there are more specifics around focus issues and navigation order that don’t make sense, please follow up and we can see if we can handle these on a one by one basis.
  *   There are some interesting ideas around using a stronger visual indicator to signifiy focus changes in the F6 loop


Ribbon Control Scenarios/Feedback
Contact: June Lee <junele at microsoft.com>
Thank you for your responses to the questions about core controls in the ribbon! Below are notes from the meeting, which includes follow up topics.
Things we came to an agreement on

  *   PREVIEW GALLERY receives focus on only the collapsed button portion, which has the AT announcement “<label> button collapsed.” Enter/space drops the gallery.
  *   SPLIT BUTTON is a single focusable item with the AT announcement “<toggle state> <label> button collapsed.” Enter/space executes the default command. Alt-down drops the menu and move focus to the first item in the menu.
  *   When focus is inside the text area of a COMBOBOX, left and right arrows move within the text area and only tab moves focus to the next control. Down and up arrows drop the menu and move focus within the menu.
  *   DISABLED CONTROLS should be focusable. This is crucial for helping non-visual users to know that this option exists, but is disabled at the moment.

Things we want to think more about and sync on next time

  *   Where is the ideal and expected location of keyboard focus after executing a control in the ribbon/menu/submenu? Jeremy and I took a stab at what we think is the ideal behavior. Here is a table of control types, what it means to “execute” it, and where focus goes depending on their location. Please add your comments directly in the table in bold.

Control Name

Executing this control means…

In the ribbon

In a menu

In a submenu

Button

Enter/space executes an action (i.e. grow font)

Focus stays on the control

The menu is closed and focus returns to the parent flyout anchor

The menu is closed and focus returns to the grandparent flyout anchor (in the ribbon)

Toggle button

Enter/space executes an action and updates the state of this control (i.e. bold)

Focus stays on the control

The menu is closed and focus returns to the parent flyout anchor

The menu is closed and focus returns to the grandparent flyout anchor (in the ribbon)

Checkbox

Enter/space executes an action and updates the state of this control (i.e. lock aspect ratio of a picture)

Focus stays on the control

Focus stays on the control

Focus stays on the control

Spinner

Update the value inside the editable text area by typing directly in the text area or incrementing the value using up/down arrows (i.e. picture width)

Focus stays on the control

Focus stays on the control

Focus stays on the control

ComboBox

Update the value inside the editable text area by typing directly in the text area or selecting an option in the menu (i.e. font)

If the menu was dropped, it is closed and focus returns to the control

If the menu was dropped, it is closed and focus returns to the control

If the menu was dropped, it is closed and focus returns to the control

Flyout anchor (aka menu button)

Enter/space or alt-down expands the menu (i.e. line and paragraph spacing)

Focus moves to the first item in the menu

Focus moves to the first item in the menu

Focus moves to the first item in the menu

Split button


  1.  Enter/space executes the default command
  2.  Alt-down expands the menu and moves focus to the first item in the menu (i.e. bullets)


  1.  Focus stays on the control
  2.  Focus moves to the first item in the menu


  1.  The menu is closed and focus returns to the parent flyout anchor
  2.  Focus moves to the first item in the menu


  1.  The menu is closed and focus returns to the grandparent flyout anchor (in the ribbon)
  2.  Focus moves to the first item in the menu

Preview Gallery

Enter/space or alt-down expands the menu and moves focus to the first item in the menu (i.e. font styles gallery)

Focus moves to the first item in the menu

n/a

n/a

Full Gallery (inside of a menu)

Enter/space applies the value of the selected gallery item and updates the selected status as necessary (i.e. font styles gallery)

n/a

The menu is closed and focus returns to the parent flyout anchor

The menu is closed and focus returns to the grandparent flyout anchor (in the ribbon)

Color Picker (inside of a menu)

Enter/space applies the value of the selected color (i.e. font color)

n/a

The menu is closed and focus returns to the parent flyout anchor

The menu is closed and focus returns to the grandparent flyout anchor (in the ribbon)

Insert Table (inside of a menu)

Enter/space inserts a table with the dimensions equal to the position in the insert table grid (i.e. font color)

n/a

The menu is closed and focus returns to the parent flyout anchor

The menu is closed and focus returns to the grandparent flyout anchor (in the ribbon)



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