Text from NVDA native dialogs should be placed in separate read-only fields for improved keyboard access

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by vtsaran on 2008-12-24 06:51
Currently, text in such dialogs as "Welcome to NVDA" can be read only by pressing INSERT+B. To improve keyboard access as well as allow users to review the text with standard navigation keys, it would be desirable to have that text inside a separate control such as read-only text box. In addition to being navigable, this control should also be placed in the tab order.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 1 by vtsaran on 2008-12-24 06:54
Before I am told that the text can be reviewed with NVDA review commands, I wanted to point out that my suggestion is primarily targeted at helping beginners who installed NVDA for the first time.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 2 by jteh on 2009-02-03 04:21
One issue with this idea is that if the text is placed in a read only edit field, it will not be read automatically when the dialog appears. This is intentional, as otherwise, we would read the entire license agreement in installers, etc., which is undesirable. (In fact, I fixed this bug recently.) Perhaps we could make an exception for this particular dialog, but it seems contrary to standard practice.

[LeonarddeR]

Now there have been some recent changes to the welcome dialog and ideas about new content (e.g. #7249, #7242), this could be considered if desired. I'm not a huge fan of it though.

[bhavyashah]

@LeonarddeR @jcsteh @feerrenrut Could you please clarify if we wish to isolate the scope of this ticket to the Welcome dialog alone, or should we open to extending it to cover other cases in NVDA's GUI where such a change may be desirable?

[jcsteh]

Aside from the About dialog (where it probably would be useful to be able to copy at least some of the text), the Welcome dialog is the only dialog where there are big chunks of info the user might want to digest piece by piece. I think the scope should remain limited to the Welcome dialog. Note that my concern from #258 (comment) still stands, however.

[Adriani90]

Actually I don'T think it is a good idea to add read only edit fields for the information. It would increase the number of tabs you need to press to cross the dialog elements. Is it not confortable enough to use the OCR for this?
Otherwise there could be kind of window virtualization implemented in NVDA, for example the addon maintained by @josephsl could be integrated in NVDA.
Then an user could press for example nvda+ctrl+w to viertualize the window. The advantage of this approach would be that the results do not depend on OCR quality.

[feerrenrut]

Unless I'm totally missing the point on this issue:

First, OCR shouldn't be necessary to read any of the dialogs in NVDA. However, I do agree that native dialogs could be made more intuitive to interact with for new users. I certainly found this difficult when first using a screen reader / NVDA.

For myself this came from not realizing that I could use numpad+7, numpad+8, numpad+9 to read this text by sentence (in desktop keys mode). Given the text can be read in this way, I think this issue could be closed. I would prefer it be replaced with an new issue requesting an improvement to the user guide to explain this interaction. It would be good if there was a small set of well documented common interactions that allowed new users to get by in most situations.