BizOneness: Accessibility to SAP is a Problem

I have not written a BizOness column for quite a while. Much of this is due to an iOS project that I am working on for LinkedIn Learning. However, everything came to a halt when I fell due to some wet, slippery grass. I fractured a bone in my shoulder falling onto concrete and now have one arm in a sling. I've been joking that I accidentally learned grass surfing and wiped out on the pavement.

My first week of having my arm in a sling was still so painful that it was difficult to get work done. However, I've been thinking a lot about accessibility as I try to navigate the world with essentially one arm. There are people out there who have this dilemma permanently. I'm in a situation where it will only be a few months before I get my arm back to full function. In either case, I've realized how many things one needs two hands for. More specifically one needs two hands to do many computing tasks including typing.

I wanted to share with you some tips for handling accessibility issues in SAP Business One. Now SAP is not the most user-friendly for accessibility. As I've mentioned before, B1 has a user interface that was modern for Windows 95. It does lacks much of the accessibility settings that it really should have. So let's take a look at a few of these and give you a few tips on how to get around accessibility issues in SAP B1.

Sticky Keys

While SAP does not support one-handed typing, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS do support a feature called sticky keys. For one-handed typing, this is probably one of the best options. On both operating systems, you can usually start sticky keys by pressing a shift key five times. Usually active by default you can also activate the switch for sticky keys through the appropriate control panel.

This changes the keyboard so that keys like shift and control can be pressed by themselves and then followed with another key. So instead of hitting Control and V at the same time for a paste, you would hit the Control key and then the V to perform the same task. For most people, this will not be as fast as a two-handed typing and it does mean hitting more keys, it does give the best control when you are using special characters. Code writing for example is a lot easier than other methods since we have so many punctuation marks in code, such as parentheses and braces plus capitalization for camel case and keywords in SQL. For long prose, such as typing in a remark in a field this might be a little long and tedious, but it's the method I seem to use the most as I am doing right now.

Dictation and Voice commands

Another option for typing and the one I'm using for most of this column is dictation. Many operating systems have dictation and voice command systems in place for accessibility. You could turn on the settings wherever the accessibility settings are for your operating system. Again, this has nothing to do with SAP but the operating system you are running on for your client.

The first problem with dictation and voice commands is you have to learn an entirely new vocabulary to use it properly. I found that very frustrating, but if you're doing things that are largely prose such as a column like this one, this works pretty well. If, you were doing things like typing SQL code, we're trying to move around Fields on an SAP window, it can be very challenging. Some systems, such as macOS, Will tag all the fields with numbers to help you navigate.

Unfortunately with the testing I've done on my Mac, I found the Microsoft desktop client is not compatible with dictation. I've yet to try it on my PC, since that one doesn't have a microphone, which obviously would be required to do dictation.

# enhancing for poor vision

One of the more annoying problems with user interfaces in SAP Business One is trying to read the screen with a small font. Tahoma 10 point even with someone with good vision and a nice size monitor can be a task to read. If your monitor is small, farther away or you have vision problems, it becomes nearly impossible to read the fonts. I've run into this problem several times while recording my videos including the SAP Business One Essential Training course here in the LinkedIn learning library. To make the fonts visible for screen capture and video, I've had to enhance the font size. This brings with it several new problems. Most dialog boxes in SAP business one were written quite a long time ago and do not have word wrapping capabilities so you lose words in message boxes.

As I've mentioned in some of the introductory chapters of my SAP courses, my solution is to use the Arial Narrow font. While not completely solving the problem using this font between 16 and 20 points inside of SAP business one tends to work nicely and increase readability.

If you go into user settings on each user you can go to the appearance tab and change the font and font size Setting these for Arial Narrow 18 point and then clicking OK changes the user's font settings only.

Be aware that font changes mess up SAP B1’s layout Engine as soon as you change the font. I tend to log out and back in again to be sure that things layout properly. If I don't, I often see missing menus, misplaced fields, and overlapping UDFs.

Let's see Change

While you get better accessibility through your web browser for modules that work on the web, that does not include all of SAP Business One. I'd love to see better accessibility features as part of the main application, instead of having to rely on an operating system that may or may not work with the client app we're using to communicate with an SAP business one instance in the cloud. SAP has been very slow to make changes of any kind for SAP version 10, but I would love to see some of these changes, even simple ones. Word wrap in message boxes would be a good start to show up in SAP Versions in the future.

There are lots I can pick on in B1's user interface, but accessibility is a high priority for me. For those of my users with vision problems, being able to use a bigger font without messing layout is a must.

Be it weeks or months, I will heal enough to type two-handed again. Many will not gain that ability. With this little adventure, I understand one of many facets of the accessibility picture. There are an overwhelming number of accessibility issues that should be addressed in all systems, including SAP.

In architecture, they talk about curb cuts. Curb cuts are the ramps that you find in curbs to allow wheelchair access from streets to sidewalks. After curb cuts were implemented, it was found their utility was for more than just wheelchairs. Baby strollers, dollies, carts, and many more wheeled Devices became easier to use with sidewalks. So with accessibility features in software. It is best for everyone when these accessibility features become integral to the applications we use every day.