Re: Getting really frustrated at NVDA
Hi all,
I will ignore the NVDA VS Jaws flaming and get strait to the point of this post.
I've found a few things that make the Explorer issue happen consistently. These all have to do with audio editing which is what I do a lot of the time, but you don't need to know audio software to reproduce.
Firstly, download Gold Wave if you don't have it already. This is simply to reproduce the issue; Gold Wave itself is largely irrelevant, it's just the program I use that seems to make it most apparent. The demo will suffice, no need to have a full version.
Open Gold Wave, and close the manual document if it opens.
Now in the Gold Wave window, press control N to make a new file. Tab to the initial file length box and type 01:00:00 (this will generate an hour of silence). I'll explain why later. Everything else can be left where it is, so tab to OK or hit enter, and you should hear Gold Wave Untitled 1. At this point, alt tabbing should work properly, and if you try to browse folders with Explorer, you should hear things read as you arrow through them.
Now let's make Gold Wave busy, as that is when the issue happens. There are probably several ways to do this, but what I did was press alt T to get into the tools menu, then E for _expression_ evaluator. Complicated stuff here, but no need to worry about it. Tab to the presets grouping, which should be a tree view. Select the noise group, then expand that and pick a preset (I used white noise). Next you want to hit OK, but before you do, read the rest of this post because it describes precisely my issue and how you can check to see if you can reproduce it.
When you hit OK in the _expression_ evaluator, it will start generating the white noise, a process which will keep Gold Wave busy. On my system it takes about 25 seconds to fill that hour file with noise. Not terribly long, but while it's processing, my Explorer issues flare up. Even if you are in the processing evaluation dialog and set the priority to pause, they will still happen, leading me to believe that my initial theories on this being triggered by heavy system load are disproven.
To recap on what exact issues I'm having: When I use alt tab, I only hear the name of one keypress. For instance I might press alt tab and hear my web browser on this thread, but if I continue holding alt and hitting tab, nothing else will be spoken. But the list does cycle, because I can still release the keys and switch between applications normally, they just aren't spoken.
Furthermore if I go to c:\, or documents, or music, or any other location in explorer, nothing is spoken when I press the arrows. The focus does move though, as I can hit enter and launch the item I am on. I use Classic Shell though, and strangely its start menu spoeaks, as wel as the desktop when I hit windows M to go there. If I hit cancel in that processing evaluation dialog, the issues stop happening when the dialog closes.
While the dialog is open, I've found that killing explorer.exe makes alt tabbing speak. But then I have no desktop or start menu which I really do like to have. If I relaunch Explorer.exe, alt tabbing at least works fine even if that processing evaluation dialog is still around. But if I close the dialog and reinstantiate it by going back in _expression_ evaluator and starting the process again, the issue will often happen again as before.
This does not just happen with Gold Wave's _expression_ evaluator, it can happen while saving a file, or doing any sort of processing to it. And as I said earlier it is not confined to Gold Wave either. It does often happen while the computer is doing something, just Gold Wave makes it more apparent. I've seen it happen with Team Talk, Reaper, Youtube-Dl-GUI, and occasionally it would just happen randomly for a couple minutes.
I really don't know what info would be useful. Display settings? Windows version? Hardware specs? NVDA logs? Meh. I can, if requested, restart NVDA to clear the log, do the thing in Gold Wave I just detailed, reproduce my issue, and then keep that log around for more knowledgeable people to peruse. It sounds like a good idea, I just hope the logs would provide useful info, and if there are any settings in NVDA I should tweak that would either help fix this, or make it easier to track down. I also thought of posting this to the NVDA mailing list but I'm not on there, and don't want to subscribe to a list that has tons of traffic. If it's a forum I'd be more apt to do it, but I think it's a mailing list. If people think it'll help though, I'd be happy to do it regardless.
What do you guys think?
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