Information about NVDA's Support for Specific Applications

This article provides answers to common questions and discusses potential issues regarding NVDA's support for specific applications.

  1. Common applications
    1. NVDA does not read in some menus
  2. Mozilla Thunderbird
    1. NVDA does not read text in the message composition control.
  3. Skype
    1. NVDA does not read the menus.
  4. OpenOffice.org
  5. Microsoft Excel
    1. NVDA does not read the cell edit control when I press f2 to edit a cell.

Common applications

NVDA does not read in some menus

Iconized menu items such as those seen in the "Open with" sub menu of a list view's context menu in the windows explorer do not provide their names to MSAA. No workarounds are currently know for this issue. Most likely the only way on how to access such menu items is by implementing ability to retrieve display information. The problem appears to be fixed in Windows vista all other operating systems are affected. There might be accessible iconized menu items in some applications where developers are handling drawing of such a menus them-selves taking accessibility into account.

Mozilla Thunderbird

The latest stable version of Thunderbird is 2.0. Unfortunately, this version does not include the new accessibility features (specifically, IAccessible2 support) that NVDA requires in order for Thunderbird to be accessible. These features were introduced in the Thunderbird 3.0 code. Thunderbird 3.0 has not yet been released. However, if you want to test this, you can download an alpha or nightly build. Be warned that these have not yet been declared stable, so the obvious disclaimers apply.

NVDA does not read text in the message composition control.

This probably means you are using Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0. See above.

Skype

NVDA does not read the menus.

You need to enable Skype's "Extended Keyboard Navigation" accessibility mode. This can be done from the View -> Accessibility menu. To do this using the keyboard:

  1. Open Skype.
  2. Press alt+v, a, e.

You may need to restart Skype for these changes to fully take effect.

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org currently requires the Java Access Bridge in order to be accessible under Windows. Once OpenOffice.org is installed, you will need to:

  • Download and install Java.
  • Download and install the Java Access Bridge.
  • Enable assistive technology support in OpenOffice.org.
    • You can do this from the Accessibility page of the Options dialog. Unfortunately, before you enable this, OpenOffice.org is inaccessible, which makes this task extremely difficult for a screen reader user.
    • Alternatively, download and run this registry patch.

In future, OpenOffice.org will implement the IAccessible2 accessibility API, which means that the Java Access Bridge will no longer be required. This work is not yet complete. See this page for the current status of this work.

Microsoft Excel

NVDA does not read the cell edit control when I press f2 to edit a cell.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Excel does not provide a programming interface to obtain information (such as the position of the caret) from this control. The only way to provide access to this control is to use display information, which NVDA does not currently support (and probably will not support for some time). A workaround has been implemented which opens custom dialog upon F2 keypress in excel's table. This dialog enables user to edit cell's content. Enter key can be used to dismiss the dialog. To input a newline character you can use alt+enter.

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