Comment 1 by jteh on 2012-05-09 23:41
Unfortunately, this is very difficult to implement, so very probably won't be done for 2012.2. It's also worth noting that it's not possible to make this meter entirely accurate or smooth, which was true even for the old installer.

@jcsteh Your #2313 (comment) seems to indicate that while this issue has a high implementation cost, you were hoping to tackle it within a release or two of NVDA. I wouldn't necessarily consider this a feature, because the request is simply to bring back a former, more desirable behaviour of NVDA GUI. Thoughts? @feerrenrut

An indication of the actual progress of the installation in my opinion would be very important.

It's worth noting that even if we reported a percentage, it would be pretty inaccurate, as is often the case with installers. People are probably fairly familiar with progress bars that get stuck at various points or suddenly leap into furious action. :)

I agree this is not a feature request as such, but I still hold the implementation cost is high and the relative benefit to users is low. Setting as p4 for now.

I want to detail a situation, maybe a little bit of an edge case, wherein this issue had a tangible impact.
I had my User Account Control Settings > Notification Level set high enough to trigger a confirmatory notification about NVDA's installation. Note that this UAC notification pops up on Windows itself and not on a secure screen. Additionally, this UAC notification does not take focus directly, but needs to be Alt+Tabbed to, and there too it is last in the Alt+Tab order. I had tons of windows open at that time, so one or two extra accidental Alt+Tabs would not have revealed the UAC notification by chance.
Having initiated NVDA's installation and since the regular beeps were constantly sounding, I just waited for several minutes. The thought of the UAC notification did not cross my mind at all nor did NVDA give any indication of it appearing. After an unusually long wait, I checked to see what was going on, decided to abort and restarted the installation, only to face the same issue again. I guess after another period of confusion and troubleshooting and trying to figure out what was going on, I finally stumbled upon the UAC notification, said pressed Yes, and thereafter needed to wait only for a minute or two.
From this experience, I would extract two problems with the current beeps:

• They play at a constant tone hiding the approximate percentage of progress of installation. This harm has been sufficiently documented in previous comments.
• They keep playing at regular intervals of time even if there is no progress. This misleads the user into thinking that some progress is being made even if sometimes none is, as was the case in the experience I described above.

Apologies for not being clearer in my last comment.
My earlier conception was that if standard progress bar beeps were my expectation as an existing user updating NVDA or installing NVDA on a new system, then the silence - both in terms of no beeps and no speech reporting assuming both were enabled - would be enough of a hint for me to realize that someting had stalled the installation. Moreover, even if silence were to not cause suspicion immediately, at least I would no longer have periodic beeps falsely assuring me that all was okay.
On reading your idea, my first reaction was that that might be a stretch. However, on second thought, I think we should be as helpful and descriptive as possible because installation could be the first step that a new blind user is taking to digital independence having just heard about and downloaded a free screen reader. I think the installation process is one place where it may be justifiable to go this extra mile and try to account for all possible problems a user might run into.