Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

NVDA does not read the symbols inserted by the word 2013 equation editor #4631

Open
nvaccessAuto opened this issue Nov 18, 2014 · 13 comments
Open

NVDA does not read the symbols inserted by the word 2013 equation editor #4631

nvaccessAuto opened this issue Nov 18, 2014 · 13 comments
Assignees
@LeonarddeR
Labels
app/microsoft-office close/worksforme enhancement feature/math p4 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority

Comments

@nvaccessAuto
Copy link

Reported by pranavlal on 2014-11-18 14:07
NVDA does not read the symbols inserted by the word 2013 equation editor. The editor uses a font calibry Math as far as I can tell. Moreover, it does not report if alphabits in that equation are sub script or super script. To duplicate the problem, do the following.

  1. launch word 2013.
  2. Navigate to the insert tab in the ribbin and then to equation.
  3. Insert an equation from the grid.

Try reading the equation such as that for the area of a circle. No go, the special symbols are not read.

Pranav
@nvaccessAuto
Copy link
Author

Comment 1 by nvdakor on 2014-11-18 18:01
Hi,
Confirmed - when I attempt to find out its hex value, NVDA does not announce them.

@nvaccessAuto
Copy link
Author

Comment 2 by jteh on 2014-11-18 22:39
Word doesn't seem to expose standard Unicode math symbols as far as I can see. Even if it did or we could map them, being able to read the symbols isn't enough. You'd still have no idea whether they were part of a fraction, etc.

Does anyone know whether any screen reader supports the Word equation editor?

@bhavyashah
Copy link

@michaelDCurran @jcsteh @Qchristensen What priority do you think should be assigned to this ticket? Since the implementation cost seems to be non-trivial, I am leaning towards P3 or P4, although I have little knowledge about the feature's value and impact.

@jcsteh
Copy link
Contributor

jcsteh commented Aug 7, 2017

It'd be good to be able to read native Microsoft Word math using NVDA's math support. (We do support MathType, but that requires a separate product.) However, there are a few challenges/considerations here:

  1. Office doesn't use MathML internally; it uses OMML. It includes an XSLT style sheet to convert between the two. We'd need to bundle an XSLT transformer to make use of this, perhaps lxml.
  2. Math occupies more than one character, whereas we really want a single character stop and then the user uses NVDA/MathPlayer commands to interact with the math in a more screen reader friendly way. I'm not sure how to get around this. Perhaps all we can do is let browse mode fake the math as a single character stop. I'd be very reluctant to override the character movement commands in focus mode.
  3. Microsoft have done some work to expose math speech via UIA. This doesn't expose the markup, though, which means it's completely different to NVDA's own math support and cannot support braille. Still, it's possible Microsoft will do more on this, so we should make sure we're fully aware of what's happening there before considering any implementation.

P3 for now, though there will probably be a high implementation cost, so this may get dropped to p4.

@jcsteh jcsteh added feature/math p4 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority labels Aug 7, 2017
@lukaszgo1 lukaszgo1 mentioned this issue Aug 29, 2020
Closed
@lukaszgo1 lukaszgo1 mentioned this issue Oct 20, 2021
Closed
@Adriani90 Adriani90 mentioned this issue Mar 31, 2023
Closed
@Adriani90
Copy link
Collaborator

This is now fixed in #16521. @LeonarddeR it would be great if you enable that by default and make it a checkbox.

@LeonarddeR
Copy link
Collaborator

As long as this is not the default, I wouldn't consider this fixed. Also note that this is not listed in the change log nor in the documentation.

@LeonarddeR LeonarddeR reopened this May 22, 2024
@LeonarddeR LeonarddeR self-assigned this May 22, 2024
@LeonarddeR LeonarddeR added this to the 2024.3 milestone May 22, 2024
@CyrilleB79
Copy link
Collaborator

If enabling the option improves things for Word equation reading, it may be worth mentioning it in the change log as well as in the User Guide.
Re the User Guide, information should be added where the new normalization options are described, but also maybe in paragraph 7 (reading math content).

@LeonarddeR or @Adriani90, would you mind add these changes?

@LeonarddeR
Copy link
Collaborator

I'm happy to do so. If there's a wish to enable this by default as well as change it from a combobox into a check box, that's fine with me as well.
@seanbudd Could you chime in here?

@LeonarddeR
Copy link
Collaborator

I'm not sure whether everything regarding the Word equation editor is fixed, especially the superscript and subscript part. Could anyone confirm that?

@Adriani90
Copy link
Collaborator

Adriani90 commented May 22, 2024 via email

@XLTechie XLTechie mentioned this issue May 23, 2024
Merged
5 tasks
@seanbudd
Copy link
Member

@LeonarddeR

I'm happy to do so. If there's a wish to enable this by default as well as change it from a combobox into a check box, that's fine with me as well.
@seanbudd Could you chime in here?

I think this option is best as a feature flag combo-box. That way we can enable this by default in future if we wish.
I'd encourage moving this discussion elsewhere as it's offtopic

@LeonarddeR LeonarddeR mentioned this issue May 23, 2024
Merged
5 tasks
seanbudd pushed a commit that referenced this issue May 27, 2024
@LeonarddeR
Several fixups for unicode normalization (#16584)
00f5ea2 
Fixup of #16521
Fixes #11570
Partial fix for #4631

Summary of the issue:
It turns out that rawTextTypeforms on a region may be None, this was an oversight on my end.
cursorPos may also be None.
@burmancomp reported a zero division error in case a string ended with a non breaking space and a space.
Description of user facing changes
No longer errors in the log when getting flash messages in Thunderbird and/or reading messages in WhatsApp UWP.

Description of development approach
Explicitly check for None typeforms and cursorPos, thereby improving readability as well.
Improve the calculateOffsets method in textUtils to ensure it can handle the case as reported by @burmancomp
@seanbudd
Copy link
Member

Is it possible that unicode normalization would automatically apply for equation editing? Perhaps we need a "smart" mode for normalization given the certain cases we think it should apply, like UIA.

@seanbudd seanbudd removed this from the 2024.3 milestone May 27, 2024
@Qchristensen
Copy link
Member

Just testing now in Office 365 (64-bit) Version: 16.0.18025.20160
with NVDA 2024.4 RC1.

This seems to work for me. Testing the suggested area of a circle and NVDA reads "A=πr^2" (Cap A = Pi R Squared)
Is anyone still having issues with this?

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Assignees

@LeonarddeR LeonarddeR

Labels
app/microsoft-office close/worksforme enhancement feature/math p4 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority
Projects
None yet
Milestone
No milestone
Development

No branches or pull requests
9 participants
@LeonarddeR @jcsteh @seanbudd @michaelDCurran @nvaccessAuto @bhavyashah @Qchristensen @CyrilleB79 @Adriani90