Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

That experience with acceessibility may be true for many websites, but certainly isn't the case for Microsoft products (and I assume websites but do not know for sure). I was on the Visual Studio Environment team, and we put an incredible amount of effort into making sure everything was accessibile. This meant not only screen readers, but also solid support for high-contrast or large font size OS modes (used by people who are not blind but have extremely limited vision). I spent many hours with my machine configured in super-low resolutions and large font+contrast mode or trying to use the product with only headphones and keyboard (monitor off).

I'm disappointed to hear that this person got such negative feedback from the companies they contacted. It probably sounds cheesy, but I fixed quite a few bugs related to accessibility and to this day I get a happy feeling remembering the feedback we got from the customers for whom this support was critical to their ability to earn a living as a software developer.

I just wanted to say thanks. :) As a person with low vision (and a heavy VS user), I'm grateful that there was so much attention to detail in the development of VS with respect to accessibility.

I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.

> I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.

For Visual Studio 2005, at least, this certainly didn't hurt, but we also had an incredibly dedicated and passionate group of people working on this issue, putting together brown bags educating developer division on MSAA and building accessible software, bringing in the creators of JAWS, logging bugs against every nook and cranny of the product, etc. etc.

I wish I could remember the names of everyone who was involved in this, but Sara Ford was instrumental. I'm glad I got to be a part of the whole thing, even though my contributions were focused on project management-type stuff.

Ah, good times! It's always great to hear kind words about the accessibility work with Visual Studio. When i first joined the Accessibility effort back in 2001, I coded in Visual Studio for 3 months without a monitor. I'll never forget the nightmares of hearing VS talk to me in my sleep :)

I'm embarrassed I can't remember their names either. It was a great group of people. (Hey Arron! Hey Lars!) But yes, the accessibility virtual team consisted of about 50 people across the division all using JAWS, Window Eyes, and other programs to open bugs. Really good times.

Hi Sara! :)

Thank you! And just so you know, this comment made my weekend.

The ADA requirements are pretty minimal -- it just has to "work." All the work we did to, for example, make the reader's navigation order sensible within the tree views for the solution explorer and class browser was because we wanted it to be good.

And because Sara Ford would just open another bug if we didn't fix it right, as mentioned in one other comment :-)

Hats off to Microsoft's Greg Lowney, who, in the early '90s -- working pretty much by himself -- pioneered this corporate focus on accessibility. A great example of intrapreneurship within a big company.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1998/10-22lowney...

+1 I was on VS as well for a while and this is very true. Accessibility, and localization were a big deal because they were a relatively small investment and opened up big markets: other countries and U.S. Government.

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