Indentation level not reported in Microsoft powerPoint 2013

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by pranavlal on 2015-03-21 02:17

1. Launch PowerPoint.
2. Create a new presentation or open an existing presentation.
3. Navigate to an area where you can enter text on a slide. This is usually the area called "object" on the slide.
4. Type some text on the slide.
5. Press the enter key to move to the next paragraph.
6. Navigate to the ribbon and activate the "increase" indent button.
7. Type some text.
8. Press the enter key.

Navigate up with the arrow keys. You can have the reporting of indentation enabled. Indentation information will not be reported. Moreover, when you use the alt+shift+right or left arrow keys to change indentation level, there is no speech feedback stating that the indentation has been changed.

[bhavyashah]

Using PowerPoint 2010 and NVDA 2017.3 on a Windows 8.1 system, after enabling paragraph indentation and setting line indentation to Speech and Tones, I was able to successfully reproduce both the reported issues. To elaborate, the two bifurcation of this ticket I am referring to are as follows:

1. No speech feedback for Alt+Shift+left/right arrows in PowerPoint
2. No overall indentation reporting despite increasing (as well as decreasing) indent in PowerPoint

I am of the opinion that 1 is more of a feature request to bring PowerPoint support at par with Word support by providing speech feedback for Alt+Shift+left/right arrow, which, as a matter of fact, toggles between heading levels in Word. 2 may still be considered a bug because reporting of indentation in a presentation is something a user would expect by default, since NVDA does that in Word and possibly other Office programs. CC @Qchristensen (thoughts on the classification of the bifurcations of this ticket ,and impact/benefit/value of improved indentation support in PowerPoint)

[Qchristensen]

A quick side note - can anyone point me to some official documentation on alt+shift+left / right arrow? What I've found for both Word and PowerPoint gives the description that it "Promotes or demotes a paragraph" (and for Word it indicates that it only does this in Outline view). In both programs, in a list, it does work similarly to tab and shift+tab in increasing or decreasing the list level / indent. When not in a list, it does adjust the heading level. In non-bullet text in PowerPoint it does change the text but the exact way varies.

The reason I raise it, is that in Word, pressing alt+shift+arrows doesn't announce the change of indent - it announces the new style (which doesn't seem to change in bullet lists "List paragraph style, outline level 10" regardless of list level). I wonder if changes to what we report when pressing alt+shift+arrows in Office (if desired) might be better dealt with on a separate issue.

Ok back to the issue at hand, pressing TAB or SHIFT+TAB has the same effect on the list level, and is reported correctly in Word. In PowerPoint, as noted, changing the list level / indent in any manner (either with alt+shift+arrows, tab or via the ribbon item) is not reported by NVDA.

I definitely agree that there is great value in implementing this. If PowerPoint exposes the right information, it might not be too hard to implement, but I'll leave that assessment to someone familiar with the code.

[Adriani90]

This is still an issue in Powerpoint 2016 / 365.

[Qchristensen]

Do we know whether the issue is that PowerPoint is not exposing the right information for us to report, or whether it is and NVDA is not looking for it?

Pressing NVDA+F also does not indicate the indent level. The "workarounds" I've found are:

• Each indent (to the third level) makes the font smaller. EG on mine, the leftmost bullet point is 28pt, one indent is 24pt, the 2nd indent is 20pt, then 18pt.

• In the paragraph formatting, (alt, h, p, g), PowerPoint does list the indent.

[devinprater]

This still does not work on Office 365; one of my students found this issue. I'll let them know about the font size change thing, thanks!