Screen readers and Outlook.com

A new person, David Goldfield has joined an email list where RantWoman gets a great deal of useful material. Here  is a sample from David Goldfield:


Awhile 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.

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