Katherine: I haven’t tried System Access, but I know both JAWs and Window-Eyes both exhibit the same issue when working in Server Manager. As to WPF applications in general, I’ve seen some well written ones too, but I agree for the most part they leave a lot to be desired. I think some of it is the screen reader, I don’t think they see a ton of WPF applications so the adaptive technology vendors choose not to put a lot of time and effort into making sure they work well. However, the application vendors themselves aren’t blameless either. Unlike traditional Windows applications, I think there’s a lot more emphasis on the application designer to put accessibility into these applications. No screen reader can create an off-screen model of a WPF application, so to a point the screen reader can only read what the application gives it to read. This is different from normal Win32 applications where the screen reader can do some interrogating of the application and at worse we can use the mouse to explore the screen reader’s OSM. I just sent our TAM a list of issues in SCCM 2012R2. I just discovered this morning that I can’t view the status of a deployment. The tabs to select between success, pending and failed don’t read at all, and plus the listviews showing the information all read as the stupid Microsoft.ConfigurationManager stuff. So I can send out deployments but have no idea how they work. Well, in my lab obviously I’ll know, but in production, nope. That’s kind of a problem, and not sure what I can do about it. So I think our TAM and I will be talking about this Monday. This migration is really starting to scare me. Ryan ________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss [Katherine.Moss@gordon.edu] Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 1:13 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessibility of SCCM 2012 - was: Remotely deploying software I've unfortunately not had the chance to upgrade this server to 2012, though I can tell you that the issues I saw were mostly in the server manager; the check/unchecked roles/features issue was one of the ones that I've also mentioned to Microsoft, and they claimed to have fixed the problem, though from what I can see as well, they've not touched anything. But the oddity about all this is that WPF applications don't have to be inaccessible, and I've seen some that work beautifully with screen readers, so where's the problem with; the application itself, or the screen reader? Amazingly, System Access will read the information when installing roles correctly, though I think, last time I checked, that it too has issues with reading checked or unchecked on the roles and features installation. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Shugart Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 2:52 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessibility of SCCM 2012 - was: Remotely deploying software Katherine: There are a lot of treeviews in Server 2012, which treeviews are you referring to specifically? What administrative tool were they in? Many administrative tools are written a little differently, some are old style MMCs, some are modern WPF applications, some are neither, so saying "treeviews" is a little vague and doesn't apply to the whole operating system by any means. In some cases, even different parts of one tool are different, for example, the part of Server Manager where you add a roll is written by one team one way, but the part of Server Manager that actually runs the DCPromo is written by a completely different team in Microsoft using very different coding practices. That's why I've had a struggle, its one thing for them to identify a problem, but even finding the right team to work on fixing the problem is not as simple as one would think. I'm just trying to get some very specific things to look at because I'm still seeing a lot of problems. One of my biggest gripes with Server 2012, if you go into Server Manager and try to add a role, you can arrow through the treeview of roles, you can hear what roles are there and the index number, but you can't here the checked or unchecked state of the roll. The same is true of features, and that's where this gets to be a problem because installing certain rolls checks certain features by default, and as a blind person you can't go through and tell what you need to check or uncheck. This has been a problem with Server 2012 since it came out. I mentioned this to Microsoft way back in January I believe, they said the problem had been fixed but even now I'm not seeing it. So do you know for sure what fixes are there, looking at your server 2012 machine now, what works that didn't before? Ryan ________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss [Katherine.Moss@gordon.edu] Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 11:10 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessibility of SCCM 2012 - was: Remotely deploying software If you have all of your updates, then you should be good. BTW, when you did the class, did you by any chance use the materials provided by Microsoft? I can't imagine those are able to have screen readers on them. But yes, you pretty much hit the nail on the head; it was mostly issues with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and screen readers reading weird information in the treeviews. Though System Access will allow you to read the info perfectly. It was basically the treeviews, the add servers dialog, and a few other places, though it's been so long since I tested for them that I don't remember, though if you have automatic updates, you should get all of the accessibility fixes, that's if they actually fixed anything. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Shugart Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 9:59 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessibility of SCCM 2012 - was: Remotely deploying software Katherine: Can you please go into more details on your interaction with Microsoft? What areas of Server 2012 did you run into problems with, and what were fixed in updates? Perhaps I just don't have the right updates installed, I recently went through the official Microsoft class on Server 2012. I admit 99% of it went fine and I was able to keep up with no issues, but there were a few key areas that showed a lot of problems. For example, if you promote a machine to a domain controller, and some of the prereq checks fail, all of the list items read as Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management... Or something similar. I also ran into issues in the Direct Access configuration section where I couldn't complete the course lab because I couldn't get to some of the controls at all to set things up, they simply did not exist in the tab order. My final big gripe was the Active Directory Management Center seemed all but unusable to me. Perhaps there's a trick to getting around this application that I don't know, but I couldn't follow the course manual to finish setting up the Active Directory Recycle Bin. I realize the course materials are designed for someone sighted, but I think I'm pretty good at translating mouse clicks into key presses. Maybe not. So I'd be very curious to hear just what was broken that you discovered and what got fixed, perhaps you were in different areas than me, or perhaps there are hotfixes I need to get installed. Not sure. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 4:40 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessibility of SCCM 2012 - was: Remotely deploying software The same for me happened with Windows server 2012; I contacted a member of Microsoft who I've known through one of the user groups and he directed me to the right individual to deal with the problem. It worked out very well, and I can't tell you ow they managed things so quickly. They actually deployed the fixes as Windows updates, which probably made some software testers flinch, but who knows. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Darragh Ó Héiligh Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 6:10 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessibility of SCCM 2012 - was: Remotely deploying software Catherine and Ryan, I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in relation to SCCM 2012 accessibility. I cant find the forum now as the technet site has been removed that hosted it. I got speaking to a really nice man in Microsoft who has been working with me very closely on SCCM 2012 accessibility. He didn't get everything finished that I needed. There's still a few tree views that I cant access but overall, he has done a fantastic job in clearing a lot of things up. It's most certainly a work in progress though. It's funny. I contributed to that forum at the time thinking that it would fall on deaf ears. I couldn't have been more wrong. People from large univercities in the US and large companies in Europe including the one I worked for at the time as well as a few governments responded to my message. The response was overwhelming. Every single person who responded were amazed that Microsoft had dropped the ball so badly. I was working on a contract in the Irish government at the time. The minister here who is meant to be responsible for this kind of thing wouldn't have anything to do with it however. I had the ear of a few key people so the head of IT in the Oireachtas and the head of IT for our courts system also contacted their TAM's in Microsoft. It was a very interesting time as similtainiously, I had a fight on my hands with Mcafee. The later versions of their secure web gateway and secure mail gateway applications became fully Java based and were not at all accessible. In a lot of ways, I had more people fighting with me to make some progress on this but Mcafee really dragged their heals. I sware they actually deliberitly went out of their way to find it hard to understand the problems I was having. Although Peter Corn is no longer working on the Java access bridge team, I even got him involved. I even went down to Bill Hanemens house and looked at the interface so that he could give his suggestions to Mcafee. He also worked with Sun around the time that the Java access bridge was started. I had some seriously loud voices behind me that time but I may as well have been talking to a wall. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss Sent: 21 November 2013 21:30 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Remotely deploying software What are the major accessibility issues anyway? I've honestly never touched it. I've wanted to, though I've not gotten around to downloading a trial. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Shugart Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 4:23 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Remotely deploying software Katherine: How recent is this? The SP2 release of SCCm 2012 did include several accessibility improvements, but there are still a number of issues in the product that make it difficult to navigate. I'm running the latest SCCM release, SCCM 2012R2 on a Windows Server 2012R2 test machine, and accessibilitywise its about the same as the SCCM 2012 SP2 release. No change either an improveing or worsening things. I can navigate it for the most part, but doing so in an environment where its managing thousands of computers? I'm not sure there. Ryan ________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss [Katherine.Moss@gordon.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 10:32 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Remotely deploying software If I may speak from monitoring technical forums and article repositories? I think there are fixes coming out soon if not already for SCCM 2012. A blind person mentioned it on the SCCM forum, and amazingly, Microsoft actually heard and responded to their call. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Shugart Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 3:37 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Remotely deploying software Hi: Are you in an AD environment? Is the package you want to push an MSI? If so, then you can just use AD to push the package out when users log in or when the computer starts up. The industry standard for this kind of thing is Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, it does software push, inventory, update management, software metering, etc. The 2007 version is very accessible. The 2012 version, I'm still figuring that out as it's a learning curve. However, it is kind of the industry standard, so, get used to it. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Scott Wheat Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2013 11:43 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Remotely deploying software Hello, I am wondering what you all use to remotely install, inventory and remove software from windows machines. We have looked at a couple of free tools like PDQDeploy, but so far haven't found something that works with a screen reader. I could very well be missing something obvious because while I have been a programmer for many years my new job is requiring me to do some windows/server/network administration and I am still at the lower end of the learning curve. Thanks for any help! 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