1. posterid:68035
  2. NVDA and outlook, discussion about columns in message list

Re: NVDA and outlook, discussion about columns in message list

Tony Malykh
 

Hi Brian,

So it looks like my ignorance was justified to some extent. I was so sure that threaded view was unusable because I did my own research on the Internet and didn't find any information about Control+Up/Down arrows. I actually don't remember finding any article about using Outlook with NVDA. This is a stark contrast with Thunderbird - NVAcces has an excellent tutorial on using Thunderbird with NVDA:

http://www.accessibilitycentral.net/accessible%20email%20client%20mozilla%20thunderbird.html

This tutorial also mentions something like "Thunderbird is the most accessible email client to work with NVDA". I don't mean to start email client war, I'm just saying that, because I was primed by this tutorial. And there is no alternative tutorial for NVDA+Outlook - or is there?

The only thing I found is an official accessibility guide for Outlook from Microsoft:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/keyboard-shortcuts-for-navigating-mail-in-outlook-ca79fe45-80e5-47dd-b7a0-841d4711ed53

That mentiones Control+Up/Down shortcuts, but the function that they perform is called: "Select multiple non-adjacent messages". Who would've thought.

Anyway, it seems to me that there is some demand for a good tutorial on how to use NVDA with Outlook. Even though I still personally prefer Thunderbird at this point, it is always a good idea to have an alternative. Especially, it seems to me that Thunderbird development slows down these days (Mozilla no longer supports them and they are asking for donations more and more aggressively), and a couple of years down the road we might have to switch to Outlook as the only viable option.

--Tony



On 2/16/2019 1:11 PM, Brian Vogel wrote:
Tony,

           You're quite welcome.   To be perfectly honest, your reaction to Outlook conversation view is far from the only one that I've seen expressing the same sentiments.  Every time I see it my first desire is to reach out and throttle the person making it.

           Outlook is an incredibly mature product, and probably is the best-supported by screen readers in general.  Most of the time issues are not with Outlook, but with ignorance about how to use it (whether that's getting it to do something you want it to do or stop doing something you don't want it to do).  I didn't even know about the CTRL+Arrow keys and discovered it in response to the questions raised here.  I generally figure that, when it comes to Windows based programs of the age and stature that Outlook has achieved, that there's almost always some keystroke sequence to do virtually anything whether I happen to know what it is or not.  I experimented to find this one, and I also experimented to discover the two-level expansion.  I found that the latter is well documented after having discovered it myself.

             I get, more than you might think, the kind of frustration you had expressed.  But what my years "in the biz" have taught me is that there's generally a solution I don't know about when it seems obvious that a lot of people other than myself would probably be screaming if there weren't.
--

Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763  

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

          ~ Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

 

 
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