Office 2010: Unable to read images with Alt tags by character

[elliott94]

Similar to issue #5466, it doesn't appear to be possible to currently examine the contents of an alt tag by character in either Outlook or Word. This could be achieved before upgrading NVDA to the latest Next snapshot; it's understandable if the cursor only allows the user to navigate to the image in question, but I think it would be beneficial if this could be done using Object Navigation.

[jcsteh]

A graphic only consumes one character in Microsoft Word. The alt text is essentially meta information; it isn't meant to be treated as "real" text. That said, I'm curious about your statement that "This could be achieved before upgrading NVDA to the latest Next snapshot". I don't see how this could be possible. Word has always treated a graphic as a single character. Can you please re-test this with NVDA 2015.3 to be certain and provide exact steps to reproduce with Word?

[elliott94]

Apologies; as you pointed out, this never seems to have been the case. I was sure when I initially opened this issue that I'd previously navigated alt tags by character, but I must have been thinking of something different!

[elliott94]

Apologies - after carrying out some unrelated testing earlier today, I'm reopening this. :)

At the current time, it looks as if it's not currently possible to actually get a character-by-character overview of the content of an alt tag. Using the Report Current Line command doesn't appear to even acknowledge that the text actually exists, and the same can be said for Object Navigation. In theory, would there be any way to make this announced when reporting the focused line?

[jcsteh]

it looks as if it's not currently possible to actually get a character-by-character overview of the content of an alt tag.

Right. As I said above:

A graphic only consumes one character in Microsoft Word. The alt text is essentially meta information; it isn't meant to be treated as "real" text.

Using the Report Current Line command doesn't appear to even acknowledge that the text actually exists

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you clarify with an example?

[elliott94]

Sure. If you open an HTML-formatted message within Outlook, navigate to a line that contains an image and then activate the Read Current Line command, NVDA doesn't announce the present text.

I think the best use case for this information being announced when reporting the current line would be when carrying out accessibility testing; a user may wish to point out the misspelling of a certain alt tag to an author, for example, and unless they know how to view the source of a message this may not be possible to do.

[Adriani90]

I think this could be solved at least in browse mode, but for that Microsoft should expose the alt text differently, like in web browsers where you can navigate the alt text character by character.

cc: @michaelDCurran this is also the case in Office 2016 and 365.