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
  3.  Skype
    1. NVDA does not read the menus.
  4.  OpenOffice.org
    1. I can't read the OpenOffice.org help or other read-only documents.
  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

If you're having troubble with Thunderbird this means you have Thunderbird 2.0 installed. Please update to Version 3.x or newer. Thunderbird 2 isn't accessible for NVDA because it hasn't got the iaccessible2 support introduced in version 3.0.

 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 Download.

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.

I can't read the OpenOffice.org help or other read-only documents.

To enable accessibility of read-only documents:

  1. From the Tools menu, select Options.
  2. Select Accessibility in the list of pages.
  3. Move to the "Use text selection cursor in read-only text documents" checkbox and check it.
  4. Press the OK button.

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 proper 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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