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When I activate the open tab in Microsoft word and Excel 2013 and navigate to recent items, I am told no recent items are present

Open nvaccessAuto opened this issue 9 years ago • 7 comments

Reported by pranavlal on 2015-08-19 14:57 When I navigate to the open tab in word and or excel 2013 and then move down to recent files, I am initially told that no such documents are present.

programs: word and excel 20133 os=windows 7

nvaccessAuto avatar Aug 19 '15 14:08 nvaccessAuto

Comment 1 by jteh on 2015-08-19 22:25 Please provide exact steps to reproduce, what you expected and what happened instead. For example, when you say Open tab, do you mean somewhere on the ribbon? What exactly did NVDA say concerning there being no files? When you say "initially", what happened afterwards?

nvaccessAuto avatar Aug 19 '15 22:08 nvaccessAuto

Comment 2 by pranavlal on 2015-08-20 00:03

  1. Press alt+f to activate the backstage view.
  2. Arrow to the item called "Open" which NVDA will identify as the "open tab".
  3. Press the space bar to activate this item.
  4. Arrow down to the "recent documents" option.
  5. Activate this option by pressing the space bar.

At this point, NBDA says "recent documents grouping you haven't opened any ddocuments recently" This is not correct because I have opened files recently which show up if I press the down arrow key.

nvaccessAuto avatar Aug 20 '15 00:08 nvaccessAuto

Just to confirm:

a) I can reproduce this in Office 2016 as well b) you need to have "Don't show the backstage when opening or saving files" NOT checked in the Save category of options (I hate negative options that require a double negative to explain like that) and c) this happens when there are recent items (it happens when there aren't recent items, but of course in that instance, it's not a bug!). NVDA reads:

"Recent Documents grouping You haven't opened any documents recently. Pick a place to browse for a document. Today grouping firstdocument.docx"

(where "firstdocument.docx" is whatever the most recent document you had open was. Ditto for Excel except replace document with workbook as needed).

Qchristensen avatar Oct 21 '16 01:10 Qchristensen

Looks like Word is exposing this incorrect message as help text via UI Automation. We should file a bug with Microsoft.

P3 because it's misinformation, but the fact that a file name is then read suggests that there are recent files after all.

jcsteh avatar Oct 21 '16 01:10 jcsteh

Did anyone fill a bug to Microsoft for this? I can still reproduce it. cc: @jcsteh, @Qchristensen

Adriani90 avatar Feb 01 '19 23:02 Adriani90

Apologies @Adriani90 - not sure why I never responded back in 2019. In any case, I can confirm I had reported it to Microsoft back in 2019, and I have also reported it again to them today.

This issue is still present and reproduceable using Office 365 (64-bit) Version: 16.0.15427.20190 on Windows 11 (64-bit) Version: 21H2 (2009), Build: 22000.856.

I can also repro with Excel. It doesn't happen using Narrator

Qchristensen avatar Sep 01 '22 02:09 Qchristensen

Update from Microsoft:

"This does appear to be an Office bug. When you navigate to the Recent tab, there is some helptext associated with the group of tabs that is exposed via the LegacyIAccessible.Help property. ... If NVDA were to consume UIA only in this experience, this could be mitigated."

Qchristensen avatar Sep 07 '22 22:09 Qchristensen