Comment 1 by dwillemv on 2012-06-13 08:49
Maybe this could be added to the existing SysTrayList add-on? The only issue I could see is that you should be able to turn it off for some icons. The battery notification comes to mind.

Comment 2 by briang1 on 2012-06-13 09:07
Well don't you have to manually invoke the system tray add in? that would defeat the whole point of the idea. The basic idea is to give an alert that a change has occured, whether its a dropbox new file from a colaborator, some status message from anti virus, new miranda chat alert or whatever.
In a way, its something windows should have its always alerting you to stuff you don't care about but I suppose that is because the sighed can see the icons without any alert.

Comment 3 by briang1 on 2012-06-13 09:09

That should have said sighted, but it didnt!

Comment 4 by jteh on 2012-06-13 09:38
It's true that sighted people can see a change, but unless the change is made obvious in some way, they won't know about it unless they're looking at that part of the screen. For example, if some text in the notification area just changes, they'd have to be looking for it to notice it. Also, consider that many programs are very dynamic in changes to their system tray icons; e.g. file retrieval applications that run in the background often include the download progress in their notification area icons. Being informed about these changes constantly would be unacceptable.

Signing into chat programs, etc. is different. I think these applications must flash the icon or use a balloon or similar. I'm leaving this open to investigate these cases, but the general idea of just reporting updates in all cases is wontfix, imo.

Comment 5 by briang1 on 2012-06-13 12:09
OK point taken, maybe the best bet then is to have some mechanism in the app module that will alert of a change in the system tray icon for that app. I think anti virus chat progs and others that use it fairly sparingly could be nice to have.

Going case-by-case seems to be the only way of implementing this, and doing that sounds somewhat impractical, IMHO. @Brian1Gaff Do you agree to close this ticket as a wontfix? From a technical standpoint, I am not exactly sure how feasible it would be to dynamically report updates to System Tray icons of a specific set of programs.

@Brian1Gaff is this still an issue? As far as I know most applications report their system tray icon status trhough Windows notifications or through own notifications like Dropbox for example.

@Brian1Gaff this is just a reminder before closing this issue. Do you still see this problem? The newest versions of many applicatoins send their change status through windows notifications which is being reported by NVDA. Can you confirm?

No updates since years, closing as abandoned.