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by extra88
1132 days ago
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1. "Accessibility" means more than just "blind people can use it." 2. "Tables" are primarily for static tabular data (but not exclusively). Excel is a "spreadsheet," a grid of interactive cells. 3. While accessibility is best thought of as an aspect of usability, the practical limitations of tables or spreadsheets on phones are usability problems for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. It's more about the touch interface than what you can see on the screen; a modern phone can display a lot more than the monitors used for the first spreadsheet programs. 4. While having vision can make it more efficient to take in and understand a lot of information in a table or spreadsheet, a screen reader user can navigate them in two dimensions if they're made correctly. Excel's core functionality is useable with a screen reader though not every single feature is. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/screen-reader-sup... |
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One of the most useful desktop applications uses a metaphor that is among other things, fundamentally incompatible with mobile devices, and also all but useless for blind people.
It's also important to note that Excel's value is not primarily as a presentation format, but a data transformation tool. Its strength is that it permits the user to define ad-hoc tables and then proceed to transform that data in completely arbitrary ways.
Adopting an accessibility first mindset, you can design software that does not use such a metaphor, enabling it to be accessible on mobile and for people who aren't sighted, but such a design would exclude a lot of the utility of Excel, since almost all of its utility comes from the grid metaphor.
> While accessibility is best thought of as an aspect of usability, the practical limitations of tables or spreadsheets on phones are usability problems for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. It's more about the touch interface than what you can see on the screen; a modern phone can display a lot more than the monitors used for the first spreadsheet programs.
This isn't actually correct. Modern phones have very high resolution, but also very high DPI. The amount of (readable) text is very low, even compared to an old 15" CRT on which you could read a 8x4 pixel font without much trouble.
No matter how high the resolution is, the fact of the matter is that a mobile phone is generously half the size of a page in a paperback. Even an old, small computer screen was the size of full two pages, if not more.