determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA
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Mary Otten
Hi all,
I have a spreadsheet, where negative numbers are denoted by the fact that they are written in red, rather than having a - before the number or having the number in parentheses, both of which I have seen in other contexts. Anyway, is there a way to have NVDA look for a specified color, in this case, red, and notify me when I have encountered a number in that color? It would be tedious to have to query each cell to see what color it is. Mary |
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Mary,
I just played with this and was shocked that NVDA did not read "negative" along with the number when this formatting is used. It is one of the standard formats allowed by Excel for negative numbers and the fact that it is negative is something that the screen reader should be detecting. The display should be entirely secondary to the actual cell content when it comes to what gets read. As far as I'm concerned this should be considered a bug. That being said, Narrator makes the same mistake (which is still a bug, which I've reported via the Feedback Hub). -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Hi, Fixing this will require looking at not only what accessibility API’s say, but also the object model for Excel and possible variations across Excel releases (made a bit complicated these days thanks to Office 365 and Office 2016/2019 transition). Cheers, Joseph
From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel
Mary, Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Mary Otten
Thanks, Brian. I was hoping I was just missing something. Nuts.
Mary
On 10/17/2018 3:49 PM, Brian Vogel
wrote:
Mary, |
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I realize this is the NVDA group, but for anyone here who also uses Narrator and considers it a bug that a screen reader would not read an Excel cell formatted as a number based on its actual value, not how it displays, I've created feedback about that.
If you feel like upvoting and/or adding comments, see: https://aka.ms/AA2ycm9 -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 06:53 PM, Joseph Lee wrote:
Fixing this will require. . . making any negative number be announced as negative, regardless of what anything else says. Math is math, and positive is positive and negative is negative and ne'er the twain shall be the same. It is essential that anyone working with numeric values knows the actual value of said numbers. -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Hi, This is the reason why I brought up object model for those willing to work on this fix, because it is sometimes helpful to go beyond just simple MSAA and UIA queries. Part of what powers NVDA’s support for Microsoft Office is use of object model (Outlook, for instance); in some cases, UIA works, but for cases where colors and other visual information is needed, NVDA asks the object model for slightly more accurate information. I do agree that NVDA should be able to detect and announce negative numbers (we had a situation for currencies back in 2012, so this experience is not quite new). What I said in the original post was provide an overview for anyone willing to resolve this situation. For others: no, I’m not questioning Brian’s assertions. Cheers, Joseph
From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel
On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 06:53 PM, Joseph Lee wrote:
. . . making any negative number be announced as negative, regardless of what anything else says. Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 07:22 PM, Joseph Lee wrote:
For others: no, I’m not questioning Brian’s assertions.Joseph, And I wish to apologize if that's how my follow-up read to you. I was simply trying to state, unequivocally, that regardless of what gyrations might be necessary, if any screen reader is to handle numeric values correctly in contexts where formatting for negatives may omit the negative sign it still must indicate negative. Otherwise all is well and truly lost. -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Hi, I wasn’t offended. Sometimes, I tend to give technical overview of what’s going on (and the info I posted will go up on Feedback Hub later today so people can be aware as to what should be done). Cheers, Joseph
From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel
On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 07:22 PM, Joseph Lee wrote:
Joseph, Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Brian's Mail list account
To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen a spreadsheet where the leading - sign is missing. If this marking as red is an alternative, it should I would have thought be expected that the software would be able to toggle between marking in colour and a minus sign.
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That would seem to lay this particular weirdness at Microsofts door. It is a bit like the stupid problem in the XP system restore where in order to work out which dates had restore points you had to find out the style of font it was written in! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Lee" <joseph.lee22590@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 11:53 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Hi, Fixing this will require looking at not only what accessibility API’s say, but also the object model for Excel and possible variations across Excel releases (made a bit complicated these days thanks to Office 365 and Office 2016/2019 transition). Cheers, Joseph From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 3:50 PM To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Mary, I just played with this and was shocked that NVDA did not read "negative" along with the number when this formatting is used. It is one of the standard formats allowed by Excel for negative numbers and the fact that it is negative is something that the screen reader should be detecting. The display should be entirely secondary to the actual cell content when it comes to what gets read. As far as I'm concerned this should be considered a bug. That being said, Narrator makes the same mistake (which is still a bug, which I've reported via the Feedback Hub). -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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Brian's Mail list account
Yes which is why I'd want to know, not by a stupid colour but by a minus sign.
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Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Vogel" <britechguy@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 12:14 AM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 06:53 PM, Joseph Lee wrote: . . . making any negative number be announced as negative, regardless of what anything else says. Math is math, and positive is positive and negative is negative and ne'er the twain shall be the same. It is essential that anyone working with numeric values knows the actual value of said numbers. -- Brian *-* Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 *The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.* ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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Gene
You are evidently talking about looking at dates in
the calendar in the XP System Restore. This shows the importance of
looking at interfaces and finding alternative ways of doing something if they
exist. XP has a show next and show previous day button. it also has
a show next and previous month button. I never used the calendar. I
used these buttons. If I wanted to go back two or three days, I would
press the show previous day button two times if I wanted to go back two days or
three times if I wanted to go back three days. Then, any restore point or
points would be shown as links. It is a web-page-like interface.
Never assume what is or isn't in an interface. And if one screen-reader
just says button, button, try another. I believe that NVDA didn't see the
labels for all of the buttons in System Restore. I'm explaining all this
not because a lot of people use XP any longer. I'm explaining it to show
how, if people assume and don't try another screen-reader, or maybe two, they
may render a task almost undoable when it's actually quite easy.
Also regarding the buttons, my recollection is that
JAWS didn't read the labels unless you turned off the virtual PC cursor, then it
did. So you have to do things that wouldn't be necessary if the interface
were properly accessible but it is very useable, though not properly
accessible.
As I said, never assume and look around.
Those are very important things to keep in mind. I realize that there are
people with all sorts of different skills and knowledge on the list but there
are many people who hamper themselves, sometimes considerably, because they have
the knowledge and the underlying skills but they don't look around and they
assume.
Gene ----- Original Message -----
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 1:31 AM
Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with
NVDA sign is missing. If this marking as red is an alternative, it should I would have thought be expected that the software would be able to toggle between marking in colour and a minus sign. That would seem to lay this particular weirdness at Microsofts door. It is a bit like the stupid problem in the XP system restore where in order to work out which dates had restore points you had to find out the style of font it was written in! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Lee" <joseph.lee22590@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 11:53 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Hi, Fixing this will require looking at not only what accessibility API’s say, but also the object model for Excel and possible variations across Excel releases (made a bit complicated these days thanks to Office 365 and Office 2016/2019 transition). Cheers, Joseph From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 3:50 PM To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Mary, I just played with this and was shocked that NVDA did not read "negative" along with the number when this formatting is used. It is one of the standard formats allowed by Excel for negative numbers and the fact that it is negative is something that the screen reader should be detecting. The display should be entirely secondary to the actual cell content when it comes to what gets read. As far as I'm concerned this should be considered a bug. That being said, Narrator makes the same mistake (which is still a bug, which I've reported via the Feedback Hub). -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 02:32 AM, Brian's Mail list account wrote:
Yes which is why I'd want to know, not by a stupid colour but by a minus sign.How nice for you. That doesn't change one of the common conventions that has been used for a very, very long time. The problem here lies not with the use of color. -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Jonathan COHN
Hello,
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Well, negative numbers can be represented visually many ways and nno matter how they are displayed if the formulas are going to work they need to be negative numbers. Some possibilities: look at the "filter special" functionality there you can filter by color or value. i.e. only shows rows where Column C is red or where column c has a value less than 200. Although my understanding of Excel filters is very limited, I have only been able to create filters for specific columns in a table, not the entire table or row values which could be useful in this case. 2. Change numeric cell formatting there is a grid to select a format for negative numbers. You should be able to do this unless the sheet creator 3.Search functionality [appears to be a not possible]locked down formats. I would have expected that with all the mathematical word done in Excel that one could search by numerical values, but I did not see an option to find the next cell with value < a specific number. 4. Pose the problem to the Microsoft accessibility desk. I can't believe you are the first person to encounter RED negatives and not been able to find them. On 10/18/18, 2:35 AM, "nvda@nvda.groups.io on behalf of Brian's Mail list account via Groups.Io" <nvda@nvda.groups.io on behalf of bglists@...> wrote: Yes which is why I'd want to know, not by a stupid colour but by a minus sign. Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Vogel" <britechguy@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 12:14 AM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 06:53 PM, Joseph Lee wrote: > > Fixing this will require . . . making any negative number be announced as negative, regardless of what anything else says. Math is math, and positive is positive and negative is negative and ne'er the twain shall be the same. It is essential that anyone working with numeric values knows the actual value of said numbers. -- Brian *-* Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 *The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.* ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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Unless I'm misunderstanding Mary Otten's original post, the issue is not really with finding anything, but with actually knowing what one is working with numerically when one simply encounters it.
I was absolutely floored that two screen readers read a negative number that used color-based formatting to indicate the negative state (and nothing else) by what was displayed in the cell in characters, not the actual data value contained in the cell. That's just wrong, plain and simple, whether we're dealing with a cell that uses a formula to derive a value or is a numeric cell where someone entered a negative value manually. -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005)
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Mary Otten
Your understanding is correct, Brian. I don’t want to use a filter. I don’t want to see numbers in isolation. I simply want to be able to read this document and know if the number I am looking at is negative or not. This doesn’t seem like it should be rocket science, but apparently it is. Mary On Oct 18, 2018, at 7:47 AM, Brian Vogel <britechguy@...> wrote:
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Brian's Mail list account
I do also think, though that when you listen to people from companies like Microsoft saying they have made this or that accessible, it should be so, not need the person to be trying lots of different ways to make work something which does not.
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I'm not criticising you, just saying that there are mitigating circumstances and we are still battling against the problem of the manufacturer not understanding the problem for us that speech is a narrow band feedback system unlike sight. Lets use as an Example the continuously changing Skype problems as an example! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Gene" <gsasner@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 1:17 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA You are evidently talking about looking at dates in the calendar in the XP System Restore. This shows the importance of looking at interfaces and finding alternative ways of doing something if they exist. XP has a show next and show previous day button. it also has a show next and previous month button. I never used the calendar. I used these buttons. If I wanted to go back two or three days, I would press the show previous day button two times if I wanted to go back two days or three times if I wanted to go back three days. Then, any restore point or points would be shown as links. It is a web-page-like interface. Never assume what is or isn't in an interface. And if one screen-reader just says button, button, try another. I believe that NVDA didn't see the labels for all of the buttons in System Restore. I'm explaining all this not because a lot of people use XP any longer. I'm explaining it to show how, if people assume and don't try another screen-reader, or maybe two, they may render a task almost undoable when it's actually quite easy. Also regarding the buttons, my recollection is that JAWS didn't read the labels unless you turned off the virtual PC cursor, then it did. So you have to do things that wouldn't be necessary if the interface were properly accessible but it is very useable, though not properly accessible. As I said, never assume and look around. Those are very important things to keep in mind. I realize that there are people with all sorts of different skills and knowledge on the list but there are many people who hamper themselves, sometimes considerably, because they have the knowledge and the underlying skills but they don't look around and they assume. Gene ----- Original Message ----- ----- Original Message ----- From: Brian's Mail list account via Groups.Io Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 1:31 AM To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen a spreadsheet where the leading - sign is missing. If this marking as red is an alternative, it should I would have thought be expected that the software would be able to toggle between marking in colour and a minus sign. That would seem to lay this particular weirdness at Microsofts door. It is a bit like the stupid problem in the XP system restore where in order to work out which dates had restore points you had to find out the style of font it was written in! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Lee" <joseph.lee22590@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 11:53 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Hi, Fixing this will require looking at not only what accessibility API’s say, but also the object model for Excel and possible variations across Excel releases (made a bit complicated these days thanks to Office 365 and Office 2016/2019 transition). Cheers, Joseph From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 3:50 PM To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Mary, I just played with this and was shocked that NVDA did not read "negative" along with the number when this formatting is used. It is one of the standard formats allowed by Excel for negative numbers and the fact that it is negative is something that the screen reader should be detecting. The display should be entirely secondary to the actual cell content when it comes to what gets read. As far as I'm concerned this should be considered a bug. That being said, Narrator makes the same mistake (which is still a bug, which I've reported via the Feedback Hub). -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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Brian's Mail list account
Lets not get into an argument over it. Seems to me that if we have been given a minus sign, we should actually use it!
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Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Vogel" <britechguy@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 2:26 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 02:32 AM, Brian's Mail list account wrote: How nice for you. That doesn't change one of the common conventions that has been used for a very, very long time. The problem here lies not with the use of color. -- Brian *-* Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 *The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.* ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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Gene
I'm not discussing when it is appropriate for a
manufacturer to state a program is accessible. and certainly, it is common
for accessibility to be improperly or incompletely implemented. I'm saying
that if blind people who want to use a wide variety of programs learn to try
different things and look around effectively, they will be able to use a lot of
programs they either can't otherwise or not nearly as effectively.
Gene ----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with
NVDA Microsoft saying they have made this or that accessible, it should be so, not need the person to be trying lots of different ways to make work something which does not. I'm not criticising you, just saying that there are mitigating circumstances and we are still battling against the problem of the manufacturer not understanding the problem for us that speech is a narrow band feedback system unlike sight. Lets use as an Example the continuously changing Skype problems as an example! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gene" <gsasner@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 1:17 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA You are evidently talking about looking at dates in the calendar in the XP System Restore. This shows the importance of looking at interfaces and finding alternative ways of doing something if they exist. XP has a show next and show previous day button. it also has a show next and previous month button. I never used the calendar. I used these buttons. If I wanted to go back two or three days, I would press the show previous day button two times if I wanted to go back two days or three times if I wanted to go back three days. Then, any restore point or points would be shown as links. It is a web-page-like interface. Never assume what is or isn't in an interface. And if one screen-reader just says button, button, try another. I believe that NVDA didn't see the labels for all of the buttons in System Restore. I'm explaining all this not because a lot of people use XP any longer. I'm explaining it to show how, if people assume and don't try another screen-reader, or maybe two, they may render a task almost undoable when it's actually quite easy. Also regarding the buttons, my recollection is that JAWS didn't read the labels unless you turned off the virtual PC cursor, then it did. So you have to do things that wouldn't be necessary if the interface were properly accessible but it is very useable, though not properly accessible. As I said, never assume and look around. Those are very important things to keep in mind. I realize that there are people with all sorts of different skills and knowledge on the list but there are many people who hamper themselves, sometimes considerably, because they have the knowledge and the underlying skills but they don't look around and they assume. Gene ----- Original Message ----- ----- Original Message ----- From: Brian's Mail list account via Groups.Io Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 1:31 AM To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen a spreadsheet where the leading - sign is missing. If this marking as red is an alternative, it should I would have thought be expected that the software would be able to toggle between marking in colour and a minus sign. That would seem to lay this particular weirdness at Microsofts door. It is a bit like the stupid problem in the XP system restore where in order to work out which dates had restore points you had to find out the style of font it was written in! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Lee" <joseph.lee22590@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 11:53 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Hi, Fixing this will require looking at not only what accessibility API’s say, but also the object model for Excel and possible variations across Excel releases (made a bit complicated these days thanks to Office 365 and Office 2016/2019 transition). Cheers, Joseph From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 3:50 PM To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA Mary, I just played with this and was shocked that NVDA did not read "negative" along with the number when this formatting is used. It is one of the standard formats allowed by Excel for negative numbers and the fact that it is negative is something that the screen reader should be detecting. The display should be entirely secondary to the actual cell content when it comes to what gets read. As far as I'm concerned this should be considered a bug. That being said, Narrator makes the same mistake (which is still a bug, which I've reported via the Feedback Hub). -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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Gene
But that is in the before computer age, where
different ways of representing some things were dominant or used without
meaningful competition from others. The medium is the
message.
As new mediums are available or technology changes
old ones, new methods of representation may become widely used because they can
conveniently be now and may be prefered, at least by many people..
Gene ----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 12:52 PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with
NVDA given a minus sign, we should actually use it! Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal E-mail to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Vogel" <britechguy@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 2:26 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] determining the color of a text in Excel with NVDA On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 02:32 AM, Brian's Mail list account wrote: > > Yes which is why I'd want to know, not by a stupid colour but by a minus > sign. How nice for you. That doesn't change one of the common conventions that has been used for a very, very long time. The problem here lies not with the use of color. -- Brian *-* Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763 *The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.* ~ Fran Lebowitz in Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (Aug/Sept 2005) |
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