Microsoft Office 2007

The Problem (in case you’ve forgotten)  It is difficult to make a document/presentation “accessible”  It must be formatted in a certain way in order to allow accessibility applications to ‘read’ it  Office 2007 is new  While solutions exist for previous versions of Office (2003, etc.), none exist for 2007

Evolution of Solution (rhyming is neato)  1 st Iteration: XML  The Good:  Deployment to the web is made much simpler  The Bad:  Communication between the XML and the Object Model is difficult  Altering the document/presentation by editing the XML is not possible  PowerPoint XML is nasty

Evolution of Solution (rhyming is neato)  2 nd Iteration: Object Model  The Good:  It is possible to edit the document/presentation through interaction with the Object Model  Much more straightforward – cleaner code  The Bad:  Deploying to the web will still require XML interaction (however, web deployment is only a secondary requirement)

Evolution of Solution (rhyming is neato)  3 rd Iteration: Data-binding  The Good:  Auto-updates is an error is fixed – less bookkeeping for us  Less bookkeeping => cleaner code  The Bad:  A back-end redesign was (once again) necessary  We had to learn data-binding…

Slight Evolutions (adaptations?)  Project Centralization  The Word and PowerPoint add-ins were completely separate projects  We combined them into one nice, neat package  Interface Changes  Vertical scroll to horizontal ‘scroll’  Panels!

Demo Time  Enjoy  Sorry, no candy (  )

The Future (DeLorean not required)  Add Width (i.e. widen)  The base foundation is largely complete  Check for a broader range of accessibility errors  GUI Adjustments  Move information up to the ribbon  Adjust interface so that it better aids the user in learning the best practices  Debugging and Documentation…

The End (My only friend, the end…)  Questions?  Comments? Thanks