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nvaccess / nvda

NVDA, the free and open source Screen Reader for Microsoft Windows
https://www.nvaccess.org/
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Handling images marked as decorative in MS office applications #13422

Open Sylduch-Conseil opened 2 years ago

Sylduch-Conseil commented 2 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When editing an office document, you may add images that you want to mark as "decorative" because their goal is only illustrative and they does not help to understand information.

Microsoft provides a procedure to mark images as decorative.

In this documentation, they say:

"If your visuals are purely decorative and add visual interest but aren't informative, you can mark them as such without needing to write any alt text. Examples of objects that should be marked as decorative are stylistic borders. People using screen readers will hear that these objects are decorative so they know they aren’t missing any important information. You can mark your visuals as decorative in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word."

Following Microsoft's description, images that are marked as decorative are announced by NVDA as "decorative image".

Having access to decorative images may be useful for a screen reader user if she or he wants to access the image to edit it or change its alternative text.

But when the user wants to read the documents, hearing multiple times "decorative images" may be disturbing and represents unnecessary information.

On the web, images marked as decorative with the alt="" attribute are automatically ignored by screen readers, and especially by NVDA. But for the reason described above, they are not ignored in word.

Describe the solution you'd like

It may be useful to have NVDA behave differently in forms or browse mode in office applications.

Reading the document in forms mode would give access to the decorative images, so that the user can edit them.

Reading the document in browse mode or with the "say all" command would make NVDA ignore images marked as decorative in order to reduce information pronounced / displayed in Braille by NVDA.

If possible, a third behavior of NVDA would be that images marked as decorative could be announced when the user displays the elements list with nvda+f7, then choosing images, or when the user types g and shift+G in browse mode to access each image.

Describe alternatives you've considered

In order to reach this, a feature could be added to the document presentation of NVDA preferences:

Additional context

I don't know how easy it is to provide a solution so I let the choice to the development team's discretion to decide which feature is easier to implement.

Thank you in advance for what you can do.

Sylvie

frastlin commented 1 year ago

This decorative option also shows up on Powerpoint 2019 and above. Images that are marked as decorative allow the accessibility checker to pass, but look terrible and make the presentation almost unusable. I would love the option to ignore decorative images when tabbing through the powerpoint.