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  2. Excel Dropdowns (i.e., submenu) - NVDA stops speaking after exiting these

Re: Excel Dropdowns (i.e., submenu) - NVDA stops speaking after exiting these

Jujube
 

Hi Heather, Yeah this is why office 365 and NVDA are a bit of a mess right now. A whole bunch of issues have been opened on GitHub and I think they're being fixed slowly but surely in upcoming NVDA releases. You can try NVDA 2021.3 beta1 which is now available and see if that helps anything. There has been some improvement in the upcoming 2021.3 release but still a fair ways to go.

Regarding the row and column header setting issue, I have experienced it myself and have reported it here: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/12882

Excel does in fact have its own column and row header setting feature which is non screen reader specific. It involves pressing control F3 on the cell you want to make into a header, then alt N for new, and then typing Title.. for the name field (you can, for instance, type Title..H10 to specify that this will only affect cells between, say, A2 and H10), but even that doesn't work properly with UIA enabled. Unfortunately you may have to be turning UIA on and off regularly until all this gets fixed in upcoming builds of NVDA. Sorry this isn't great news at the moment, but it's the truth.

On Tue, Nov 2, 2021 at 2:41 PM David Goldfield <david.goldfield@...> wrote:

Heather, I vaguely remember encountering this problem and I have a slightly simpler workaround. Once you select an item from a drop-down press the Windows key twice instead of pressing alt+tab twice. In fact, it’s likely that pressing the alt key twice will also force NVDA to begin reading as you navigate your spreadsheet. I think the trick is to move your focus away from and then back to the spreadsheet.

 

David Goldfield,

Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist

JAWS Certified, 2019

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www.DavidGoldfield.org

 

 

 

From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Heather Campbell
Sent: Tuesday, November 2, 2021 5:37 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] Excel Dropdowns (i.e., submenu) - NVDA stops speaking after exiting these

 

Hi Jujube and Gene,
Thank you, Jujube, for your response. When I checked the "use UI automation with Excel," it did fix the issue that I described where NVDA stopped talking after choosing an item from a dropdown. Unfortunately, after I checked this checkbox, NVDA stopped reading column titles that I had defined using Excel's define name feature. I also could not press NVDA + Shift + C to set column titles or NVDA + Shift + R to set row titles. It just typed a C or R in the cell. 

Heather

 

From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> on behalf of hurrikennyandopo ... <hurrikennyandopo@...>
Sent: Tuesday, November 2, 2021 8:06 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io>
Subject: Re: [nvda] Excel Dropdowns (i.e., submenu) - NVDA stops speaking after exiting these

 

Hi

 

If that works can you let us know.

 

Thanks Gene nz

 

On 3/11/2021 6:31 am, Heather Campbell wrote:

Hello everyone, 

I'm experiencing an issue when using NVDA 2021.2 to interact with dropdowns/submenus in an Excel file (Office 365). I can press Alt + Down Arrow to expand the list, Down Arrow to the desired option, and then press Enter. However, if I then try to navigate in the sheet, NVDA stops talking. If I Alt + Tab to a different window and then Alt + Tab back to the Excel file, NVDA starts speaking again. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Are there any work arounds? I'm using Windows 10, version 21H1.

Thank you!

Heather 
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