Life was good, and there I was humming along with my new Microsoft Office 2008 for the MAC… having a grand ole time inserting the new MACish clip art into a new artsy PowerPoint template. Things were going great, and I was actually thinking about praising Microsoft for a creating decent product for a change.

Then this weekend it hit me. There is no option to add alternate text for images in Microsoft Word 2008. What the hell? Do they expect that MAC people are all artsy-fartsy types who don’t care about making accessible technology and only care about making pretty pictures? I am teaching a course on Accessible Electronic & Information Technologies, and Microsoft is forcing me to revert back to my old, decrepit PC in order to make accessible Word documents.

Microsoft Word 2008: Good for Artsy-fartsy shit / bad for Accessible technology development

I cannot believe this negligent oversight that has occurred. Is technology moving backwards? Microsoft Office 2007 for PC has these accessibility options, but a year later they can’t get it right for another OS? I feel like they rushed the development of this software to push it out the door. I feel cheated. Not only is Microsoft cheating me and other accessible technology developers, but they are also cheating the disabled users utilize the inaccessible documents that are created by this substandard product.