Comment 1 by leonarddr on 2015-08-05 09:17
Have you list reporting enabled? Go to nvda menu>preferences>Document formatting and enable the report lists checkbox.

Comment 2 by csm120 on 2015-08-05 09:22
Wow I'm so sorry. That fixed it. I just wasn't thinking of lists in that way. Thank you.

Attachment Word list test.docx added by leonarddr on 2015-08-05 09:43
Description:
A Word attachment containing several list types

Comment 3 by leonarddr on 2015-08-05 09:44
Nice to hear that it works for you. However, this made me think about an issue I'm having eventhough reporting of lists is enabled. NVDA does report numbers and bullets like "*", but as soon as i create a list with "-" (dash), it doesn't report the bullet properly. See the attachment I just added. I will make someone check whether the last list in this document contains bullets visually. If not, this ticket can be safely closed.

Comment 5 by leonarddr on 2015-08-05 10:02
confirmed. The last list in the attachment document contains dashes visually, though they are not being announced by NVDA.

Comment 6 by vrdhn on 2015-09-13 06:21
I'm working on this.
The character used for non-numbered bullet can come various fonts, like Symbol font, Wingding font, or even normal unicode fonts.
For symbol and wingding font, the plan is to map them to map to corrosponding unicode symbol, and then add unicode symbols in symbols.dic file.

However, the o and dash used by word is actually standard ASCII. With symbol level most, the dash is pronounced correctly.

With fix to ticket #2446, the level number will be anounced, so user will be able to undertand that there is a list under the caret.

However, another idea, worth exploring, is to also replace o and dash by the visibaly-equivalent unicode symbol, but only for Bullet character. Any comments on this ?

Attachment bullet-types-5267.docx added by vrdhn on 2015-09-13 07:11
Description:
A word document containing various bullet types

Attachment bullet-types-5267.2.docx added by vrdhn on 2015-09-13 15:57
Description:
Adding a couple more bullet types.

Comment 8 by vrdhn on 2015-09-13 16:03
Hi,
I'v create a small patch to achieve speaking of some commonly used bullet types in word. The attached document lists those bullets.

As discussed over seperate private mails, the patch will map the most common used character-points from winword's PUA to the corrosponding unicode symbols. A few missing symbols have been added to symbol.dic file.

It's worth noting the limitations of this approach here.
A complete and correct implementation should Firstly, map the character and font ( symbol or winding) to the corrosponding unicode, and Secondly, do the translation for all text.
However this implementation only maps most often used bullet-characters from Symbol and Wingdings fonts, and converts them to unicode. Implementation only translates the bullet text ( and NOT the normal text), and works for sentence / paragrap / read all navigation.

The git repo is  git@bitbucket.org:manish_agrawal/nvda.git
and the branch is in_t5267

Thanks

NVDA does report numbers and bullets like "*", but as soon as i create a list with "-" (dash), it doesn't report the bullet properly.

@LeonarddeR, do you have your symbol level set to most or all? For me, dash bullets don't get reported at level none or some because dashes don't get reported at those levels. However, they do get reported at most or all. I don't think there's really much we can do about this unless there's some semantically better Unicode symbol for a dash bullet.

@dkager, @Qchristensen, @michaelDCurran, thoughts on how common this is? Just trying to work out what priority we should give this.

list items denoted with a dash I would guess are not as common as asterisk / bullet list items, but I think they are still used quite regularly. Particularly as it's an easy conversion from plain text.

Another way around it could potentially be to check the style of the text - any list will default to "List paragraph". That way it wouldn't matter what symbol was used. The issues with that would be that both bulleted and numbered lists are identified as "list paragraph", and also it's possible to create custom styles which work as a list. Theoretically it's possible to set text in the middle of a paragraph to be "list paragraph" too but I wouldn't expect that to be very common.

As it is now, the list is automatically indented, and assuming NVDA is set to announce indentation, that is announced as you enter a list.

Back to the original point, I think the easiest to understand for the user would still be to find a way to announce that a dash list is still a list, even if the current symbol level wouldn't normally announce dashes.

Sorry, missed this one when searching for an existing issue. Lists with asterisks are quite common. The dashed lists I think already use a plain dash, but the asterisk is a Private Use codepoint that is brailled but not translated by liblouis, e.g. '\xf0b7'.
Just announcing if something is a list is not enough for nested lists (which can also use different bullets for the different levels). Here it would be useful if you knew an item was called 1, a, or had a bullet.

@jcsteh: Indeed, changing symbol level to most or all does report them, but I'd honestly prefer a fix to have them read for the some level as well.

At first glance the associated PR looks good, though I wonder if we shouldn't replace the PUA codes with ASCII. Even U+2022 (bullet) isn't in all braille tables. On the other hand it could be argued that those symbols are closer to what the PUA ones actually look like.

@leonardder commented on 11 Jan. 2017, 5:02 pm AEST:

@jcsteh: Indeed, changing symbol level to most or all does report them, but I'd honestly prefer a fix to have them read for the some level as well.

I don't think that's possible beyond changing dash to level some (which we don't want to do). Even if we said that all punctuation should be read regardless of level for line prefixes (bullets, numbers, etc.), then you'd get the full stop being read for numbered list items, which would annoy users as well. The reality is that the dash is just used for way too many things.

@dkager commented on 11 Jan. 2017, 7:35 pm AEST:

At first glance the associated PR looks good, though I wonder if we shouldn't replace the PUA codes with ASCII.

I totally accept that the Unicode characters aren't in a lot of tables, but using ASCII feels like a hack to me and is likely to cause us problems in the future. For speech, we'd then have to map those ASCII characters to some words and those words could be wrong or confusing depending on context.

One final concern: is the PR complete with regards to the possible bullets you can encouonter? And do the replacements visually match? I haven't been able to find a good reference for all standard bullet types.

We should probably try to include all bullets you can type on the keyboard, e.g. dash, asterisk, and the fancier bullets like => and <>.
I can't find a "to get this symbol, type this" reference. Maybe the list gallery can help. I think there are only a handful of default styles we need to deal with.

Could someone please summarize the limitations of the current implementation and what work still remains for this issue to be fully addressed?

WRT the braille side of things, an update is in #6778 (comment).