Dear all,

Google Docs has a number of keyboard shortcuts requiring Ctrl+Alt+N to
be pressed. You may have guessed where I am going with this, but here
are a few specific remarks in this context:
* I press NVDA+F2 so that the next keyboard shortcut I press goes
straight to Google Docs without the interference of NVDA. That doesn't
work and NVDA+F2 followed by Ctrl+Alt+N still restarts NVDA. I
understand why this edge case might have been missed, but I was
wondering if this this issue has already been documented on the GitHub
tracker?
* I realize that I can just alter the hot key to launch NVDA from the
Properties dialog corresponding to the NVDA Desktop icon for instance.
But is there any cleaner alternative approach to this problem?

I would greatly appreciate any assistance with the above.

Thanks.

--
Best Regards
Bhavya Shah
Stanford University | Class of 2024
E-mail Address: bhavya.shah125@gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhavyashah125/

This isn't an edge case; Alt+Ctrl+N is *NOT* an NVDA keyboard shortcut; it's a Windows one. I'm not sure if NVDA could somehow intercept it and stop it triggering the shortcut, but even if it could, this would likely be a bad idea, as, in the case of NVDA playing up, it may prevent the user from restarting NVDA without restarting the whole system.

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 07:08 PM, Sascha Cowley wrote:

This isn't an edge case; Alt+Ctrl+N is *NOT* an NVDA keyboard shortcut; it's a Windows one.

-
Yep.  It's a Windows keyboard shortcut that fires up NVDA.

And Windows is what gets to see any keystroke sequence first, and if it's a defined shortcut it will process it.  Only if it's not recognized by Windows will it get passed along to the accessibility software (screen reader), and only if it's not recognized by that application will it get passed on to the next thing (Google Docs app under the browser, in this case).

You would have to change the Windows Shortcut so that CTRL+ALT+N would be passed to NVDA, which would ignore it, and it would then fall through to the browser, then to Google Docs running in the browser.
 
--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 20H2, Build 19042  

The depths of denial one can be pushed to by outside forces of disapproval can make you not even recognize yourself to yourself.

       ~ Brian Vogel

 

I think in theory it might be possible to write an add-on that sends Control+ALt+N keystroke directly to the browser window bypassing Windows. NVDA+F2 is not using this way though as others explained.

But the bigger problem I see here is that all the shortcuts in Google Docs are inconvenient to put it mildly. Google essentially had to implement their own screenreader in browser. And they were bound to use inconvenient set of shortcuts because the set of shortcuts you can use from within browser is very limited. I wish there was an interface similar to IAccessible2 or UIA to let NVDA to communicate with google docs directly inside the browser. But I think creating such an API would require long collaboration between NVAccess and Google. And it doesn't seem plausible that this is going to happen for just a single product. Sigh.

the set of shortcuts you can use from within browser is very limited

This should really say "the set of shortcuts you should use from within browser is very limited". Technically, they could use almost any keyboard shortcuts, apart from system keyboard shortcuts, they just don't, because that would stop people from being able to access their browser. That is why, for example, their menus are all accessed with Alt+Shift+<letter>.

I think in theory it might be possible to write an add-on that sends Control+ALt+N keystroke directly to the browser window bypassing Windows. NVDA+F2 is not using this way though as others explained.

But the bigger problem I see here is that all the shortcuts in Google Docs are inconvenient to put it mildly. Google essentially had to implement their own screenreader in browser. And they were bound to use inconvenient set of shortcuts because the set of shortcuts you can use from within browser is very limited. I wish there was an interface similar to IAccessible2 or UIA to let NVDA to communicate with google docs directly inside the browser. But I think creating such an API would require long collaboration between NVAccess and Google. And it doesn't seem plausible that this is going to happen for just a single product. Sigh.

On 1/12/2021 4:01 PM, Bhavya shah wrote:

Dear all,

Google Docs has a number of keyboard shortcuts requiring Ctrl+Alt+N to
be pressed. You may have guessed where I am going with this, but here
are a few specific remarks in this context:
* I press NVDA+F2 so that the next keyboard shortcut I press goes
straight to Google Docs without the interference of NVDA. That doesn't
work and NVDA+F2 followed by Ctrl+Alt+N still restarts NVDA. I
understand why this edge case might have been missed, but I was
wondering if this this issue has already been documented on the GitHub
tracker?
* I realize that I can just alter the hot key to launch NVDA from the
Properties dialog corresponding to the NVDA Desktop icon for instance.
But is there any cleaner alternative approach to this problem?

I would greatly appreciate any assistance with the above.

Thanks.