Optionally stop the speaking of the window title in excel or make what is spoken customizable

[pranavlal]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

By a problem, if you mean a bug, not specifically.
My wife is a magnification user who has also begun to use nvda.
She does a lot of work with Microsoft excel. She is navigating on a
spreadsheet by using the mouse. When she does this, many times, nvda speaks
the full file name of the workbook.

As a pure screen reader user, you absolutely need this information but not
as a partly sighted user.

Describe the solution you'd like

Can the speaking of the window title be made optional? We should probably have specific verbosity for excel which would govern how much information nvda will speak.
We could and probably should extend this feature to all other programs.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I have thought about writing an add-on for excel that would suppress the speaking of the window title but I am uncomfortable with that approach because I am overriding the default behaviour of nvda.

Additional context

Verbosity control is needed not only by sighted users using nvda but could also be handy for totally blind users in terms of increasing their productivity.

[seanbudd]

Welcome @pranavlal ,

We are unable to process this issue as it stands.

• Please give us clear steps to reproduce the issue.
• Please reproduce this issue and provide a log file of the behaviour. Ensure your log level is set to debug in general preferences.

Kind Regards,
NV Access Software Developers

[CyrilleB79]

Hi @pranavlal

You seem to be describing an issue, i.e. the title of the Excel window is reported many times while working in Excel. This is not expected since the title of the window should be reported only when the window comes to foreground (or maybe also when you put the mouse pointer exactly on the title bar of the window) Thus, you should have used the issue template, not the one for new feature.

Anyway, a quick try in Excel allows me to give the following steps to reproduce the issue:

• Open a document in excel
• Put the mouse in cell A1
• Move the mouse on the 'A' button on top of the column A.

Actual result:
The title of the window is reported.

Expected result:
This move is still in the same window so the title should not be reported again.

Note: I have described one situation. I do not know if there are other situations in which the title is reported when it should not.

[pranavlal]

Hi Cyrille and all, Many thanks for your steps for duplication. This is exactly what my wife is doing. The reason I did not use an issue template is because I thought this was a feature request and not a bug. A screen reader is supposed to read objects under the mouse so I thought that was expected behavior.

[Adriani90]

@pranavlal if you enable cancelable speech in NVDA advanced settings, does NVDA still report the window title? If yes, I guess the mouse focus movement is not touched by that setting yet and should definitely be considered.

[CyrilleB79]

@pranavlal if you enable cancelable speech in NVDA advanced settings, does NVDA still report the window title? If yes, I guess the mouse focus movement is not touched by that setting yet and should definitely be considered.

@Adriani90, this setting is already enabled by default in NVDA. I have performed tests with cancelable speech enabled and disabled and the result is the same. In any case, I do not understand why you think that this setting may matter.

[Adriani90]

@CyrilleB79 this setting has been introduced to cancel speech from an event that has expired where the focus was before. I think this could be extended to solve this issue, that is to prioritize the reporting of the mouse focus over Window title.

[CyrilleB79]

@CyrilleB79 this setting has been introduced to cancel speech from an event that has expired where the focus was before. I think this could be extended to solve this issue, that is to prioritize the reporting of the mouse focus over Window title.

@Adriani90 I do not understand your reasoning and why you make a link with this setting.

Since the mouse (and the focus) remain in the same foreground windows, there is no point reading again the title of the window.

There is also no focus move at all so no new focus event either, expired or not.

[Adriani90]

@CyrilleB79 unless I am really missing something here, my understanding of the problem is that while moving the mouse cursor in Excel, NVDA reports the window title again and again in certain places. This specific reporting of the window title could be canceled while moving the mouse cursor through the window.

Maybe not 100% related, but see #11632 for some details. Also #11049 and #10885 give complete details of this approach.