Hello,

Technically, it's as accessible as earlier versions. However, I don't recommand upgrading.

I did so, and now, Word and PowerPoint are much slower than before with Jaws 16, especially when navigating in the text with arrow / Ctrl+arrow keys.

You have also the super joy of having to go through 3 dialog boxes when you want to save a file: first to select that you want to save on your computer (and not one drive and other cloud stuff), second to select the folder and then finally the usual save file dialog. What a nice simplification ! They do so only because they want to encourage you to use their one drive, office 365 and so on.

Another super thing also:  they purely removed shortcut keys such as Alt+I for ignore in spelling correction (F7). You have now to tab each time. Efficient, really.

If I had known, I wouldn't have upgraded !

IT seems that this is the same for Office and for Windows in general: each other version is good and then bad.
Windows XP: good; vista: bad; 7: good; 8: bad; 10 we expect good.
Office 2000: good; XP: bad; 2003: good; 2007: bad; 2010: good; 2013: bad; 2016: we expect good.

Has someone tried the newly released 2016 version ? Is it better ?

I have a friend wreseling with Office 2013 Outlook, and having a hell of a time with it.
Might there be a tutorial that will cover Jaws 16 and outlook 2013? And, that won't cost and arm and a leg? lol

Thanks so much for any help with this.

I'm in a class at school called BIM (business information Management), where we use Microsoft, and learn, Microsoft Office. From what I've gathered so far, it's mostly accessible with jaws, but start getting into charts and graphics (especially reading both) and you'll find not so much. That's word. As for powerpoint it's good with reading most powerpoints, save those with graphics of course. Excel looks accessible when you open a book and it is, when you're just typing things into cells, but other than that... not so sure. I'm not too sure about the other office products since we aren't working with them at the moment.

  Also I've noticed that office 2013 runs way! slower! than the other versions. It also makes me angry that when you open documents from emails, it opens them in protected view, where you can't even read the document until you do a save as on it. Not to mention it takes 5 seconds just to load up a blank document, when word 2003 just flew through all of those tasks. It seemed that the productivity level with 2003 was much higher

You can turn off the backstage views, anoying extra pages when it comes to saving files. As well as turning off protective view. To do this go into word. I am asuming that you have vertual ribbons on. Hit alt and left arrow untill it says your name submenu, it may be who ever the program is redgestered to if not in your name. Then hit the right arrow and go down to options. In options first tab to you hear show the start up screan at start up and uncheck that. Next go to the catagories list box and arrow down to  save. Go to don't show the back stage when opening or saving files and check that. For protective view arrow down to trust senter, then tab to trust senter settings ...button and hit enter. Arrow down to protective view it's the next one down. Then uncheck the ones you don't want protective view to open, or all if you want. Tab to okay and you are good to go! Something I did notice, but I don't know if it's in 10 or not. With Spell Check you can't use alt A, Alt C, and the spell checking short cuts which means a lot of tabbing which is anoying. You could in 07 but not any more. Also 07 the spell checker was buggy and often what I spell checked it either didn't save the changes, or it didn't change them half of the time.