Darragh:
I'm sorry you're having issues with the O365 admin interface, I am able to get what I need done using JAWS and Edge Chromium, but agree the UI can be very confusing especially if you don't need to go into the admin interface much. I recently had to mess with the licensing on my personal tenant and while I got what I needed done the UI was laid out in a very confusing way. I've said this before, but everyone having problems with this, please email edad@microsoft.com if you haven't already. We need to get these bugs open for the O365 team, and the only way we can impress upon them that this is a problem is to get them user feedback. So don't hesitate and don't hold back. Make sure EDAD knows your frustrations.
I'm really glad you are having a good experience, on the other hand, with Windows Admin Center, I've been personally working with that team quite a bit, and they still have some bugs to clean up, but honestly that product has come a long way from where it was a few years ago and I'm glad to hear the feedback from a customer, we don't hear much about that product.
Ryan
-----Original Message-----
From: Darragh Ó Héiligh
Thanks for getting back to me Ryan,
I understand what your saying about logging reports. But I'm not usually in a position to do this. There are a few solid reasons. But all are surmountable given the right motivation. The motivation here is action and less conversation. I'm not being abrupt. I'll explain what I mean below:
1. I've logged bugs and issues for years now and I get a few standard responses. (A) Please describe how it should work? This is really frustrating when you tell the support person that it's completely not readable and they ask you how it should work. (B) they completely don't understand the application that they are supporting. For example I reported the read only edit area issue in OneDrive . I can't properly interact with and read text files using that app in IOS.
2. I'm not an employee of Microsoft. Sure, it's in my best interest to make sure that Microsoft are informed of accessibility related issues, but I have a life and that life involves fulfilling obligations to my employer, my family and myself. Writing a detailed bug report to Microsoft for them to disregard most of it and ask a lot of the same questions again makes me less than motivated to bother. I just don't have the time to spend.
3. I also understand that I'm being very unfair. Microsoft have made major strides forward in the past few years but even with your work and the work of others striving for more accessible applications in Microsoft, you're working in a highly distributed system. I think back to that frustrating call relating to the combo boxes in Azure. Several teams were on that one call because the team that developed the combobox are different to the team developing the rest of the UI / implementing that control. A few years later, the comboboxes are largely accessible but other silly things go wrong. For example, you mentioned the license area in Azure. That uses a similar search function as the users UI in Azure active directory. You can get to that by pressing e or shift plus e but it doesn't work. You actually need to go to the bottom of the screen, press shift c to jump to the first combobox then start typing. That get's you into the search box. I use these tools every day and I'm very practised in getting around them but I am absolutely furious with the inconsistency. Because when everything is going well, the inconsistency is a bit of an annoyance. But when you have a license problem, or a whole lode of users have been locked out, or an a web app stops responding, those inconsistencies are yet more things that I need to think about in an already highly pressured environment. Oh and then for a while, the Office365 portal let me search for users but when I tried to set focus on one, the browser window completely crashed. It's really not good enough. It's better. Don't get me wrong, but it's not good enough.
Here's a suggestion. Arrange a monthly call for 1 hour. Ask for input a week before that call from blind system administrators and advanced computer users. Don't let it fall into a rant session but instead make sure there are actions taken from that meeting and planned deliverables for the next month. If there's a steady stream of progress made, perhaps people like me won't be so frustrated.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ryan Shugart
Hey Darragh:
No worries, I completely understand where you're coming from. Before I came to Microsoft I was in much the same position you are now, so I get it and I definitely don't think you should spend a lot of time on bug reports. I do know there are people at the EDAD who are familiar with the pro apps, and they should be helping you out, in cases where they don't know for sure they should be working with the product team to figure out the repro.
As you said yourself, Microsoft is a big company, speaking from personal experience, you don't even realize how big until you're there. I think I spent my first few months going "Wow, this is huge." Anyway, my point is there are a ton of different teams, using a lot of different design systems, and while we've made a lot of progress teaching them about accessibility there's still a long way to go. Some divisions have different approaches as well, I work with a lot of the teams who build and design Azure, for example, but don't have a lot of visibility at all into the teams that design Office 365. EDAD does have that visibility and that's why they should be your first stop to report an issue.
There are also several customer feedback avenues we're working on as well, including some specific to my group in the Cloud+AI division. If anyone is interested, please reach out to me privately and we can see what we can do. Its sometimes difficult to find customers who are blind/visually impaired who are willing and able to work with us on improving our products, but I can say for sure one of the things that seems to motivate a product team the most is to actually see and understand how a customer is struggling with their product to get their job done. A lot of developers don't understand how a screen reader should work and asking what a good experience should be is a valid question, and is a way for the person who knows best, the actual end user who is depending on the product, to step in and give that all important feedback. Again I do understand there needs to be a balance between making your job accessible and actually doing your job but let's see if we can meet in the middle here. Darragh, let me forward this thread to some others in MS and see what they say.
Ryan
-----Original Message-----
From: Darragh Ó Héiligh
Hi Ryan,
I want to say thanks for all the efforts that you have done to make things better. I have my own O365 tenant, but I would like to make a suggestion if this makes sense. Adding to Darragh's comment... If there was a means to give us access to a demo site to test accessibility issues out without us having to mess with our production environments then we could make even more progress because those scheduled conference calls could have any of us demo to the developers what we are dealing with. I did this for one of the largest insurance companies I worked for in recent months as a contractor. We used Azure but it just really didn't work for me.
Kind Regards,
Billy
-----Original Message-----
From: Ryan Shugart
participants (3)
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Billy Irwin
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Darragh Ó Héiligh
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Ryan Shugart