NVDA reports "List" when focus is on the "Close" button in Excel's Name manager

[Qchristensen]

Steps to reproduce:

In Excel, press control+f3 to open the name manager.

Actual behavior:

Press TAB to move through the options. Focus moves from the list and current list item, to "Refers to", to "list", to "new", then "edit" then, "Delete", then "Filter" then back to the list.

After "Refers to", NVDA's focus highlight outlines the list again, however the close button is what should have focus. Pressing enter also activates the close button.

Narrator does correctly identify the "close" button.

Expected behavior:

After "refers to", where the focus moves to "List" it should actaully be on the "close" button.

NVDA logs, crash dumps and other attachments:

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

NVDA version:

NVDA 2022.3.2

Windows version:

Windows 11 (64-bit) Version: 22H2, Build: 22621.819

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:

Office 365 (64-bit) Version: 16.0.15726.20196

Other information about your system:

Other questions

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

If NVDA add-ons are disabled, is your problem still occurring?

Does the issue still occur after you run the COM Registration Fixing Tool in NVDA's tools menu?

[britechguy]

I can replicate this with Excel 2016, too. Specifically, version 2210, build 16.0.15726.20188, 32-bit

[Adriani90]

Narator and also Jaws seem to work as expected in this dialog.

[Adriani90]

I think NVDA identifies the close button but the speech is interupted by another UIA event or so which leads to pronouncing "list" instead of "close button". Still reproducible with NVDA 2024.2.

cc: @josephsl any idea on this one?

[josephsl]

Hi,

Cause: possibly outdated object navigation/parent retrieval logic. When moving to "new" or "close" buttons, NVDA will announce name manager dialog content because NVDA believes the "parent" of these buttons is the dialog when it may not be so. This is because when this code was written (I think 2016), Excel had bad MSAA implementation for this dialog. Things may have changed now (thanks to what we get from Narrator, and I can confirm that Narrator does announce button labels correctly). The actual person to contact is @MichaelDCurran (I think we might as well revisit MSAA/UIA implementation for Office controls now that UIA is slightly more mature).

Thanks.

[Adriani90]

cc: @gerald-hartig is there any discussion on this at NV Access? Would revisitting MSAA implementation in NVDA in favour of the more up to date UIA for MS Office controls improve things?