Editor's note: the following post is authored by Mary Bellard, Information Technology Services Manager at AFB.
On January 14, GW Micro announced, with support from Microsoft, they will make their Window-Eyes screen reader product available at no additional cost to any user with a license to Microsoft Office 2010 or newer (including users with a Microsoft Office 365 subscription). The only stipulation for using the full version of this product is that Office 2010 or newer needs to be installed and activated locally; users with access only to Microsoft Web Apps will be limited to a 30-minute version of the product. This version of GW Micro’s screen reader will also work outside of the Office programs, just as the current retail version of Window-Eyes operates.
Window-Eyes for Office is now available at www.windoweyesforoffice.com and differs slightly in the features and support currently offered with the full retail version. Most notably, the free version has a limited number of synthesizers included in the default installation, although additional synthesizers can be purchased. Supplementary materials, such as installation discs, braille manuals, and large print materials can also be purchased at an additional cost for the users of this free version.
Technical support is offered for any installation issue without charge, but users asking questions beyond installation will be required to pay a fee. GW Micro is offering multiple technical support packages to meet different user needs and can be reviewed in the Support section of the Window-Eyes for Office website at www.windoweyesforoffice.com/Support. GW Micro intends to continue development of its retail product, but Software Maintenance Agreements (SMA) for current licenses are not available for renewal. It will be interesting to find out how this changes the availability and use of Window-Eyes within the business and education fields in the upcoming months.
This announcement is particularly significant because it means Microsoft and GW Micro just expanded their user sets to include either those who previously did not want to pay for the Window-Eyes product and/or currently use another screen reading program. The market for users reporting problems with the Office Suite, and there are many accessibility problems to report, will increase significantly. My hope is this spike in user feedback will allow Microsoft to better understand what features of the Office product cause the greatest usability issues and encourage more timely resolution of those concerns.
The area with the most potential for improvement as a result of this licensing change is web and application development. As long as a developer is using a locally installed version of Microsoft Office, he/she will be able to use Window-Eyes to test a product’s accessibility. It has been an uphill battle to get accessibility concerns raised early on in the design process of a website or application, so having a free, full-featured tool available to developers to begin accessibility testing sooner is a very good thing.
Web developers commonly limit their accessibility testing to an open source product like the NVDA screenreader or use the free 40-minute demo version of the JAWS screen reader. Both of those products are excellent and popular in the blind and low-vision communities, but Window-Eyes is often left out of the development and testing phases because it either was not as economical as NVDA or as popular as JAWS. To further complicate things, the End User License Agreement (EULA) for JAWS states that "these demonstration or evaluation licenses are not permitted for purposes of development and testing of JAWS scripts, applications, HTML coding, or other Web Based code." This means that web developers using the free demo of JAWS for testing the accessibility of their product are in violation of the EULA and encouraged to purchase a fully-licensed version.
GW Micro does not restrict the use of the Window-Eyes product, either retail, demo or this new Window-Eyes for Office version, for development and testing purposes. Window-Eyes, therefore, can now be used more conveniently and effectively for web and application accessibility testing.
The announcement of this ongoing partnership between GW Micro and Microsoft is important because an accessibility testing barrier was just removed for developers and the availability of screen reader options for users was just improved. I wonder if the accessibility of Office is the last hurdle before Microsoft starts to offer a full-featured screen reader pre-installed with future operating systems, the way Apple utilizes its VoiceOver product. Inevitably, Window-Eyes for Office will provide Microsoft with significant user feedback, and hopefully serve as the much-needed impetus for future versions of Office to address accessibility problems more aggressively.
”Improve” keyboard photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
