----- Original Message -----

From: Quentin Christensen

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2018 10:46 PM

Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA

I did also reply to Brian's other thread on this topic, and while I'm just personally interested in the discussion, I realised no-one has actually answered Mary's original question yet.  While you can't specifically have NVDA decode negative numbers which aren't formatted as such, you can have NVDA report when the font colour changes.  This would be most useful where you spreadsheet contains say all black text except for negative numbers.  To do that, press NVDA+CONTROL+D to open the document formatting options, then press alt+c to jump to "colour".  Press spacebar to toggle whether that is checked (you want it checked to report colour changes), and press ENTER to close the settings.  Now when you get to a negative number, NVDA should report it as "bright red".

As for why it is reported as "bright red 18.00" and not "-18.00", basically, that's what the person who setup the spreadsheet told Excel to tell us.  A sighted user on the same sheet doesn't see "-18.00", they see "18.00" in bright red, and interpret that to mean -18.  In the same way if the actual contents of the cell are "=A1-B1" they see the number, not the formula, unless you press CONTROL+` to toggle displaying formulas instead of values.

I can see Brian's argument for overriding the specified formatting here, but would have to then ask back - in which cases should we override what the creator of the spreadsheet has deliberately setup, and in which cases should we defer to what they wanted?

Regards

Quentin.

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 4:20 PM Pranav Lal <pranav.lal@...> wrote:

Hi all,

Can someone share a sample sheet with this kind of formatting?

Pranav

--

Quentin Christensen
Training and Support Manager

Official NVDA Training modules and expert certification now available: http://www.nvaccess.org/shop/

www.nvaccess.org 

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NVAccess 
Twitter: @NVAccess