blue background / white text .... settings

[Guest]

Thanks Jay,

the problem with altering the settings in this manner is that it has a domino effect, web pages etc are displayed different when the developer has used default settings - the effect of which makes these pages less readable.

The solution would be MS Word future versions allowing users to configure this particular setting to colours of their choice. I believe that colour schemes can have impacts on users with dyslexia / colour blindness / visual imparement / etc. I'm not sure how the increased drives towards usability on the www will impact MS Word, but if MS are increasing the accessibility issues in FP then I can't think why it shouldn't be taken on board here.

anyway,I think this is going a bit off......

thanks again.

 

[Jay Freedman]

From occasional discussions with the Word developers, I can appreciate some
of the constraints they have to live with, and I think they make it unlikely
anything will happen in this area.

First and always, a suggestion has to meet the criterion of "Will this
change increase sales, or will not making the change decrease sales, by
enough to justify the cost of making the change?" In this case, I suspect
the answer is no, there would be negligible effect on sales. Possibly it
could be justified as part of an overall effort to improve the program's
accessibility, as you suggest, but it would be far behind such things as
making sure everything in Word works properly with screen reader programs.

Second, a suggested change has to avoid breaking backward compatibility. In
this case, there's probably no effect.

Third, the change has to be controllable and "discoverable" -- that is, new
users and upgraders have to be able to find out it exists. That would mean
at least another control on an already crowded Tools > Options > View
dialog, probably similar to the color pickers in the Font and Borders
dialogs, plus changes in the Help; and it would need to be added to the VBA
language for macro support.

Finally, there's the question of why Word should override the Windows
background color setting, when almost no other applications do so. I
understand that "holy wars" sometimes break out in the MS offices over
questions like that.