Xobni and JAWS
Recently I had read about Xobni in the news. It is a new add-in for Microsoft Outlook that promises to provide a new way to view and organize your mail. I was specifically interested in its search capabilities and the ability to locate conversations with a specific person. So today I installed Xobni for a test drive.
The first thing I noticed is that Xobni.com is very bare-bones by today’s website standards. This is fine with me – perhaps they’re dedicating most of their resources to their product. Being quite basic, the site was quick to navigate and find the download I was looking for.
After downloading the installer I installed the product. The installation program is standard and accessible enough, working fine with the JAWS screen reader. I realize this is not a comprehensive accessibility testing technique and I will point out here this exercise was not meant to be such. I just wanted to see if I could use the tool and if it would do as advertised.
Next up was actually trying to use the functions of the tool. Xobni put a menu item on Outlook 2007’s menu bar, and that is accessible enough. The options included showing and hiding the sidebar, which can be checked and unchecked. I opened the Analytics tool from this menu and it opened a new window that displays a graph of email usage. There was some text in this window that can be read with the JAWS cursor; however it takes careful reading to work out the context. It appears most information is presented in a graphical chart form in this window.
Next up I set out to try what I really wanted to use: the search and conversations features. I ran into an immediate problem: I could not find these features added anywhere in Outlook’s interface. Tabbing the main window didn’t help, and there was no new menu items for searching or displaying conversations. Opening the Help PDF file I learned that there are a couple of keyboard shortcuts built into the tool. Ctrl+~ moves focus to the search bar, and ctrl+shift+` moves focus to the sidebar. (There are a couple of others.
I pressed the key combination to move focus to the search box, and this did work. JAWS reported that I was on an unnamed edit field. (There is no MSAA information available to identify this edit field either.) According to the manual, as soon as you start typing in this field, a window slides over to show results. I am not sure if such a window appeared, however, JAWS was unable to find one, even when reviewing the Outlook window with the JAWS cursor. So this was a dead-end.
I then tried the Ctrl+Shift+~ keystroke to move focus to the sidebar. This also seemed to work, at least focus went to a panel with a button. The button was unnamed and pressing focus movement keys such as Tab and arrows did not do anything. Attempting to activate the unnamed button via keyboard also didn’t do anything that JAWS could detect.
Lastly, it is worth noting that when focus is moved via the aforementioned keystrokes to the Xobni panels, focus cannot be moved back to the rest of Outlook such as the list of email messages via the keyboard. It is necessary to click the mouse in the main interface of Outlook to restore normal keyboard focus and functionality.
Xobni still sounds like a promising tool and I hope that it can include some accessibility support in future releases. Since it is a new tool in its infancy, today’s experience is not surprising although still a bit disappointing.
October 14th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I use Xobni myself and love it. It is disappointing that it is not more accessible, but as you said, it is new. Did the website have a way to contact the developers? Maybe we can start an email campaign.