Comment 1 by nvdakor (in reply to comment description) on 2015-04-21 18:19
Hi,
A few important points:
Replying to bhavyashah:

Proposal - The status of the Start Menu search, i.e. Searching..., Search Complete and No items match your search should be reported automatically eliminating the requirement of manually checking the status through screen review.

Hmmm, someone may ask for all status objects to be announced automatically. This is not desirable in all applications, and it causes NVDA's event queue to be flooded with change events that it should not accept.
Possible implementation and flaws:

• If these status messages use name change or other change events and if it can be identified (unique window class name, control ID, etc.), then it might be possible to implement this (and this cannot be done).
• The above approach will not work if the change event is fired every time someone modifies the search term, whether new terms are added or characters are deleted. This is quite verbose, and users will ask how come NVDA is so verbose when other screen readers are not.
• It also suffers from localization issues - different language packs for Windows may present this box differently (differing spelling, terms used, translations, etc.).
• The original poster says this approach is universal. This isn't the case for Windows 8 and 8.1 (will need to test it under Windows 10 tech preview). Thus this solution is applicable on Windows 7 and earlier (XP, Vista, 7) unless there is a way to detect that Windows Search did in fact return some results or none.
• One should not rely too much on screen review, as screen review announces what's on screen, which may not be useful in some cases (such as newer controls where screen review fails). in fact, experience shows that screen review should be used as last resort, to navigate the screen content and for understanding layout purposes.
• We cannot reject the proposal outright, as there are times when it is desirable to announce that no search results are found. This requires some careful aproach to handle this case unless NVDA core already provides this.

Technical: You need to modify how search results are announced by editing Windows Explorer app module (explorer.py). This app module also provides routines to announce certain toast notifications in Windows 8/8.1, potentially useful in Windows 10 when announcing notifications from the new Action Center.
I'll leave it open in case others have anything to say. Thanks.

Comment 2 by jteh on 2015-04-21 23:50
We already have specific support to handle reporting of Start Menu search suggestions in Windows 8.1 (#3322), so specific changes for the Start Menu aren't out of the question.

That said, reporting this status text could actually get quite annoying. On most systems, searches happen quite fast, so hearing "Searching..." and then "Search complete" could be extremely verbose and possibly superfluous. It may also clobber other potentially useful information.

We'd need to think very carefully about the user experience before implementing this.

I tend to agree with @jcsteh. If NVDA announced "Searching..." and then announced, "Search complete", prior to announcing the focused item, this would get really verbose. Thoughts from others? CC @josephsl

Hi,

Windows 10 specific changes were implemented as of NVDA 2017.3 (#6241), not in a position to investigate Windows Vista as support for it has ended as of this year. Live region change is a tempting solution (#7281 and friends), but only if the control supports it. As I outlined above (as nvdakor), it leads to event flooding, possibly leading to people not hearing results in time to react to it, or worst, select the wrong result.

I'll close this for now. Please reopen if and only if sufficient (and compelling) justification is there. Thanks.

For me announcing 'searching' and 'search complete' makes no sense, however 'no items match your search' is quite useful, and for sighted users the fact that nothing has been found is obvious visually, so adding this one might be nice.

Hi,

This is possible in Windows 10 Settings app - will need to investigate this for Windows 7 and 8.x provided that it can be done and does not introduce negative user experience.

Thanks.

Hi,

I'm a bit hesitant to implement this suggestion for older operating systems (Windows 7 and 8.1).

Thanks.

Hi,

2022 update: the Windows 10 Settings app version is now available as of NVDA 2021.3.

Anyone would like to take care of this for older operating systems?

Thanks.

I may take a look at this at some point. In general this seems to be a good candidate for a P4 which should be closed only when NVDA drops support for anything older than Windows 10

This decision should be taken by NV Access officially since this issue requires a change on NVDA side. Microsoft ended support for Windows 8.1 completely in 2020, and other Windows versions older than that are also not supported anymore.

@Adriani90 - we will not be doing work on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7, as they are expected to be dropped in 2024.1, when updating Python.

@seanbudd thanks for the update, i am closing this one as abandoned in this case as I did with other issues that also affected Windows 8.1.
I guess an official statement from NV Access regarding the timeline for dropping the support would help also to raise awareness for this in the community.