1. nvda@nvda.groups.io
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NVDA Verbosity for Grouping and sorting messages in Outlook - Can it be changed?

Josh Miele
 

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
Brian Vogel
 

Josh,

         I'll let others get into the verbosity settings that might be changed, as I can't answer that.  I am posting only because I have retitled your topic for archival purposes and to make it clear the question is about NVDA verbosity related to using Outlook, not Outlook itself.

         By the way to the readership, if it turns out that there are Outlook settings that can be tweaked to decrease NVDA's verbosity in a circumstance like this, that still counts to me as addressing the interaction between NVDA and the program.  But I suspect this will be fixed, to the extent it can be, via NVDA settings rather than any Outlook settings, though I could be wrong about that.

--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 2004, Build 19041  

It’s hard waking up and realizing it’s not always black and white.

     ~ Kelley Boorn

 
Sean Randall
 

Hello,

 

Ideally I suppose you could match this with a regular expression in a speech dictionary, but  Outlook seems to send this to the synthesizer in a couple of chunks (if I look in the speech viewer, the final expanded or collapsed statement comes across on a second line sometimes).

 

Still, a dictionary entry could  reduce:

Group By: Expanded: Date: Yesterday  grouping  expanded”

To:

“Date Yesterday expanded”

Assuming, of course, you wanted the date datum as part of the output. Personally I just want the day, because  it’s  obvious it’s grouped by date if I am collapsing a group of days

Sean.

From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Brian Vogel
Sent: 04 November 2020 18:38
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] NVDA Verbosity for Grouping and sorting messages in Outlook - Can it be changed?

 

Josh,

         I'll let others get into the verbosity settings that might be changed, as I can't answer that.  I am posting only because I have retitled your topic for archival purposes and to make it clear the question is about NVDA verbosity related to using Outlook, not Outlook itself.

         By the way to the readership, if it turns out that there are Outlook settings that can be tweaked to decrease NVDA's verbosity in a circumstance like this, that still counts to me as addressing the interaction between NVDA and the program.  But I suspect this will be fixed, to the extent it can be, via NVDA settings rather than any Outlook settings, though I could be wrong about that.

--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 2004, Build 19041  

It’s hard waking up and realizing it’s not always black and white.

     ~ Kelley Boorn

 

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Luke Robinett
 

Thanks for calling this out. It’s a long-standing NVDA annoyance that I’ve just sort of learned to live with, but it would be great if we had a proper solution at some point. I don’t have any suggestions for resolving the verbosity of groupings but you can change the order in which the columns in the message list appear And consequently the order in which those fields are read aloud. For example, in mailing lists like this one, I care less about who sent it or when it was sent and more about what the subject is, so I put the subject as the first column. I don’t have Outlook in front of me at the moment but you can make these adjustments in the view ribbon, I believe by tapping until you get to view settings. Hope this helps a bit, at least.
Deborah Armstrong
 

I am sorry I can't be very specific, but in fooling with my view settings in outlook I managed to turn grouping off and it cut out all that verbosity. You can adjust your view to include fewer columns too. Since NVDA is reading outlook's document object model and not the screen it should respond appropriately if you adjust your view to be more minimalist.
Another thing to know: if you are focused on a message that is a newsletter and outlook announces garbage about pictures not downloading, etc. you can use your applications key, select junk, select "not junk"and by marking this message as not Spam, anything else coming from that sender will be whitelisted. Whitelisting a message also causes Outlook to not display and NVDA to not speak verbose messages about it. Because outlook is so configurable, you will find that changing its settings radically affects what NVDA speaks.
Tony Malykh
 

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.

--Tony

On 11/4/2020 10:14 AM, Josh Miele wrote:

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
Ralf Kefferpuetz
 

To reduce the announcements in the message list go to the document settings with NVDA-Control-D, press alt-t twice to find the table section and disable announcements of tables, table headings and cell coordinates.

 

From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Tony Malykh
Sent: Donnerstag, 3. Dezember 2020 18:47
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] Grouping and sorting messages in Outlook

 

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.

--Tony

On 11/4/2020 10:14 AM, Josh Miele wrote:

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
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