[Excel] read entire row/column

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by ManuelRamos on 2010-09-11 14:00
Congratulations for NVDA 2010.2 that is coming soon!

I'm not an Excel extensive user.

However, I've been requested to report that it would be fantastic that NVDA could read with a single command, alll horizontal cels in Excel.

So, speaking with portuguese and brazilian users and members of NVDA local comunity, I've been told that NVDA should, if possible, incorporate 3 new commands in Excel:

• Read horizontal cles;
• Read vertical cels;

- Read all document (perheaps it is already covered by NVDA+down command).

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 1 by jteh on 2010-09-12 23:10
Changes:
Milestone changed from None to None

[ehollig]

I believe it is now possible to do this with the Report Table row / column headers option In NVDA's Document Formatting dialog.

[derekriemer]

No, that's just row and col headers.

[jcsteh]

#1911 requests this more generally, but because Excel is not a text document, it probably won't be able to benefit from this and will thus require separate implementation.

[feerrenrut]

Comments moved from #5404 quotes referring to #5404 (comment)

Outstanding questions pertinent to reading rows / columns in excel:

why it's more efficient than just cursoring through the sheet

#1911 gives some insight into this. The action of cursoring takes focus away from the content.
The user has to:

• consider if you have reached the last call with data in the row / column
• press the arrow key

whether empty cells should be skipped

This is still a good question. I would imagine they should be skipped for the following reason.

• Skipping makes it easier to understand the cells that are empty
  • Faster, because you do not have to wait for each cell coordinate to be announced.
  • Requires less memory, the users does not have to count and remember the number of cells skipped.

The option "cell coordinates" in the document formatting dialog plays into this.
Consider the following use cases:

• A user who wants to know about empty cells.
  • Essentially cares about cell boundaries.
  • Turns on reporting of cell coordinates.
  • They do not need to hear "hello A1, A2, A3, world A4" to know that two blank cells were skipped. This could be achieved with "hello A1, world A4"
  • [warning, scope creep ahead] If this were not enough we could add an announcement: "hello A1, two cells skipped, world A4" I would suggest this be considered out of scope for this issue. It should be request, justified, and validated as a new issue.
• A user who does not want to know about the empty cells, but cares about the cell boundaries of cells with data.
  • This is someone who wants to ensure they dont get confused about which data comes from which cell. EG "red car blue" vs "red A1, car blue A2"
  • Turns on reporting of cell coordinates.
• A user who does not care about any cell boundaries, the data has enough context to understand which cell it is in.
  • Turns off reporting of cell coordinates, if they find it distracting.

whether coordinates should be read

This should be based on the, "cell coordinates" option in document formatting.

whether regions should be respected

Not sure about this one, opinions / explanations welcome.

[Adriani90]

This could be easily implemented. By selecting the row or the column and pressing the keystroke for reading selected text (NVDA+Shift+uparrow in desktop or NVDA+shift+s in laptop layout). Currently the keystroke for laptop layout is not working anymore.
NVDA+shift+uparrow in desktop layout is working. However, it reads the selected range (a20 20 till a15 70) but not every text in the cell. In laptop layout, the say all keystroke (NVDA+shift+a) does actually the wrong thing in MS Excel. it reads the range of selection (like NVDA+shift+uparrow in desktop layout). There is a big inconsistency regarding this keystrokes. I will open a new issue for this.

[surfer0627]

Hi,

User require this feature in mailing list #92122.

Thanks.