Accessibility - Atpoke - Reports - Reply

Task: Reply to an email

The task of replying to an email can be broken into the following steps:

  1. Find the email to which one wishes to reply
  2. Open the email
  3. Write a reply
  4. Send the reply

Of these steps, there were major difficulties with ‘Find the email to which one wishes to reply’ and ‘Write a reply’.

One way a person can find an email is to search for it. Unfortunately, At-poke cannot get to the search bar. At-poke can get to Advanced Search under Search in the drop-down menu. However, after a user types in a search and clicks Ok, the Advanced search window closes with-out doing a search.

Another way to find an email is to visually see it in the email list and click on it. Using At-poke, the only way to scroll though messages until one reaches the email to which she wants to reply is to use the next and previous buttons. This becomes cumbersome when the email is low on the list because using the next and previous buttons take several steps within At-poke.

Once the email is open, the user would, obviously, want to respond. However, At-poke cannot get to the body of the message. It can paste into the email. So, a user could write a reply in a different program and copy it into the email.

Regardless of how the user gets text into the email message, she may wish to spell check the message. At-poke does allow access to the Spell Checker window. However, once in the Spell Checker, it cannot get to any of the buttons aside from close.

Summary of Problems:

  1. Cannot get to search bar
  2. Advanced Search windows closes before showing search results
  3. The only way to scroll through emails is using the next and previous buttons, which is cumbersome.
  4. Cannot type in the body of the email
  5. Cannot use buttons in Spell Checker

Recommendations:

  1. Make it possible for users to get to the search bar
  2. Show the search results and allow the user to close the Advanced Search Window
  3. Create a to just use arrows to see the next and previous messages would be helpful
  4. Make it possible for users to type into the email message
  5. Make it possible for users to access the buttons in the Spell Checker window
 
accessibility/atpoke/reports/reply.txt · Last modified: 2006/09/19 15:10