I can't help you with Outlook, but I just wanted to mention that this is one of the annoyances that prompted me to look for an alternative email client - and that's how I found Thunderbird. In terms of verbosity it is much better. So if you are not bound to outlook, fwiw you can consider Thunderbird as well.
Folks:
I'm looking for advice on reducing the verbosity of the message grouping info in Microsoft outlook.
As you navigate through messages, tasks, notes, or any other Outlook items that have been sorted and grouped, there is an extremely long announcement that happens whenever you transition from one group to another. Groups can be date ranges, priority flags, labels, etc. depending on how you've sorted your items. Sometimes the grouping info actually seems to be spoken twice which makes it even worse. The final frustration of the problem is that the relevant information about the newly selected Outlook item is spoken after the grouping information, which means you need to sit through a flood of overly-verbose and redundant TTS before you can get to the info ab out the current item.
For example, inbox messages are grouped by "today," "Yesterday," "last week," etc. If you're arrowing down through the message list, the info about each message is spoken as it is selected (e.g., subject, sender, arrival time, etc.). However, when you arrow from the first message of Today to the last message from Yesterday, NVDA speaks a bunch of info about the newly selected group before speaking the expected message info. Depending on the grouping and sorting criteria, this can be quite a bit of verbiage...
A relatively tame example of a grouping message is: "Group by: Expanded: Date: Yesterday grouping Group by: Expanded: Date: Yesterday Selected: Expanded" These messages can be much longer if you've sorted by criteria in addition to date.
Obviously we need access to the info about these groupings, but I find the way it's presented to be extremely frustrating. Can anybody tell me how to reduce this verbosity or to improve the user experience with this?
BTW, I recently installed the Outlook Extended add-on which is really cool. I was hoping the authors might have included some mechanism for managing this problem, but unfortunately not yet.
Best to all!
--JAM
