In Word (2016) Inline Objects such as text boxes, charts, shapes and images are announced as "slash".

[Qchristensen]

When navigating around a document with inline objects, many are announced as simply "slash":

Shapes and text boxes are announced as "slash" when navigating.

charts are announced as "embedded object" when navigating, but "slash" when selected.

Pictures are announced as "graphic" when navigating, but "slash" when selected.

(Using NVDA 2016.2.1 and Office 2016)

[jcsteh]

The difference between selection and normal text navigation will be fixed by #4874/#5104. The issues during normal text navigation require some tweaks.

CC @michaelDCurran.

[comanna]

Hi,

This issue also relates to #5738”

I have a Word document that contains two appendices which are set out as “Text Boxes” that NVDA calls “Text Frame” when it gets into the BOX. The only way that I can find to get into the BOX is to find A particular word that is known to be contained in the box. I see that this issue is described above by Quentin.
The sample given in the issue #5738 is a perfect illustration of what I mean and so you can replicate the problem from there if you wish.

It appears that nobody has found a way to navigate these boxes. I understand that the difficulty is that they can float and so it is difficult for the screen reader to lock on to them.

As a matter of interest, I copied the entire document, including the two appendices, into clipboard in hopes of removing the text frames but the Windows “cut and paste” also failed to trap the contents of the text boxes!

I had a sighted person do the same on their machine, and they were surprised to find that the contents of the text boxes, which they could see clearly in the Word document, failed to be captured by the cut and paste routine into their notepad session! All that appeared was a forward slash "/" as described above. I think the code below could resolve both of these issues.

I found the macro below, installed it in Word 2016 and it works like a dream to find each text box in turn.

I wonder if it could be used to guide new NVDA code to find text boxes and give users the option to view the contents of each box in turn?

Sub SearchTextBox()
Dim shp As Shape
Dim sTemp As String
Dim iAnswer As Integer

For Each shp In ActiveDocument.Shapes
    If shp.Type = msoTextBox Then
        shp.Select
        Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.Select
        sTemp = Selection.Text
        sTemp = Left(sTemp,20)
        iAnswer = MsgBox("Box contains text beginning with:" & vbCrLf _
          & sTemp & vbCrLf & "Stop here?", vbYesNo, "Located Text Box")
        If iAnswer = vbYes Then Exit For
    End If
Next

End Sub

Source:
http://wordribbon.tips.net/T012249_Finding_Text_Boxes.html
by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 27, 2015)

[feerrenrut]

It seems like we have a good place to start for this. Priority 2 to test out whether we can integrate the suggestion by @comanna. Otherwise priority 3.

[LeonarddeR]

Would it be possible to add these objects to the elements lists while on this? It would be a nice addition if we could list embedded objects, for example.

[Adriani90]

This is reproducible in all MS Word versions.