-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Grossoehme
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2021 2:33 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] Admin's Notes Re List Conduct, Please Read

Good Afternoon: As far as the search problem I have a computer user
from back in the early '90s. I still have problems in searching. I
have gone so far as changing search engines if I can't find the exact
item that I am hunting for.

Dave


On 1/4/2021 5:29 PM, Orlando Enrique Fiol via groups.io wrote:

At 06:23 PM 1/4/2021, Brian Vogel wrote:

Betsy, you know I've lent you a hand directly on occasions, and I
would be happy to keep doing so in regard to polishing your web and/or
archive search skills such that you know the process for zeroing in on
what you're looking for in a very great many cases. That would be a
great Chat Subgroup topic for any and all who want to join in and
improve such skills.

My frustrations with online searches are not with phrasing my queries in order to get hits; I usually get hundreds to thousands of results. My issue is in finding the relevant information on the pages for each activated result. Microsoft's forums, the Super User forums and many others are so cluttered with header information, upvote/downvote crap and ads for driver checking software that I often find myself no better informed after navigating those pages by links, text, controls, articles, block quotes, etc.
I can only imagine how frustrated a beginner would feel when queering Google for, say, the key command to begin playback from the beginning of a file in VLC. The documentation includes no complete hotkey list, and the hotkey dialogue itself is horribly inaccessible.. Videoland's VLC forums are full of exhausting threads and subthreads lasting pages and pages.
But, I happened to mention this to a sighted friend the other day. He did a Google search and it took even him nearly ten minutes to ascertain that the relevant key command is nothing more than the letter P.
Now, come on, we shouldn't have to read through dozens of forum threads to learn that. This is what frustrates people; the signal-to-noise ratio during online searches is very low. I would want to type "VLC Key Commands" into Google and get a hit saying, "Complete List of VLC Key Commands" or shortcut keys. I don't want to read dozens of forum thread to ascertain a single key command.
If you like, I can figure out how to export in some form my last hundred Google searches. Choose, say, three, and time yourself, of course working only with a keyboard and screen reader, to see how long it takes for the relevant question to be answered. I think you'll be unpleasantly disappointed.


Orlando