Confirmation of action in Word for Windows

(Originally posted June 5, 2020 By ~ Ali Forelli)

Hi, I’m Ali Forelli, a Program Manager on the Word team working on Accessibility. I’m excited to share that Word now sends Narrator users confirmation that their keyboard commands were successful, and alerts them to any edits that were automatically applied after they were typed.

Define work verification

Have you ever tried to copy and paste text into a Word document and ended up with a bad image or, worse, nothing? Have you ever tried to remove bold formatting from a word and accidentally applied bold formatting to an entire paragraph? Formatting can be a confusing experience for sighted users. Now imagine trying to navigate these scenarios when you can’t see the screen.

Confirmation of actions lets users know if the action they attempted was successful. This feature has been requested by customers for a long time, but has not been available in Office apps. The existing method of exposing these notifications did not allow screen readers to control the verbosity of the notifications, which risked being too noisy for assistive technology (AT) users. In April 2018, Windows added a new API that allows apps to trigger notifications and group them by notification ID. This allows screen readers like Narrator to apply logic to these notifications and share them as needed.

Added confirmation of actions for the following keyboard shortcuts and autocorrect:

• Cut (CTRL + X)
• Copy (CTRL+C)
• Paste (CTRL+V)
• Bold (CTRL+B)
• Italics (CTRL + I)
• Underline (CTRL + U)
• Undo (CTRL + Z)
• Redo (CTRL+Y)
• Automatic capitalization
• Auto-correct spelling

Action Confirmation

In this work, we targeted keyboard shortcuts that screen reader users commonly use to access commands, and which are already labeled on the buttons in the ribbon.

memo: If the commands listed above are started from a menu (using a keyboard shortcut), action notification confirmation is not available.

How it works – Keyboard shortcuts

Press Windows key + CTRL + ENTER to turn on Narrator. When you perform one of the keyboard shortcuts listed above while editing a Word document, you will receive a notification when the action is completed successfully. For example, if you highlight text and press CTRL+B, you will hear “B Bold on” or “B Bold off,” depending on whether you are applying or removing bold formatting. Before this change, users would hear only “B,” even if bold formatting was applied correctly.

Now let’s look at the problematic command combination, copy and paste. To successfully paste, press CTRL+V and you will hear “V”. [last word pasted] Paste.” But sometimes, pasting doesn’t work as expected. Whether you forgot to copy the content with the confirmation of the action, or the website or app you’re copying from didn’t add the content to your clipboard, when you press CTRL + V, you only hear “V” and not the notification that the paste was successful.

How it works – Autocorrect

We also added support to notify users about auto-corrections that are applied to text after they finish typing a word. For example, if you start a sentence without capitalizing the first letter, typing a space character (when you finish the word) will automatically capitalize the first letter. When you launch Narrator, you will hear “Auto-corrected.” [word]You will be notified that the word you previously entered has been corrected.

Enhancing clarity through technology

The Word team is proud to work with the Windows Platform team to leverage new technologies to make people’s lives easier. We’re excited to see what innovations will come next!

effectiveness

This feature is available in Word for Windows for both Beta and Current Channel (Preview) users using Version 2002 (Build 16.0.12527.20092) or later.

We usually release features over a period of time to make sure everything is working smoothly. This also applies to Insiders. Since we release slowly to a larger number of Insiders, we highlight features that you may not have. Sometimes we remove elements based on your feedback to make it even better. This is rare, but we also have the option to remove a feature from the product entirely, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it out.

feedback

We want to hear from you! Go to: help > feedback To submit feedback on this feature, please contact Word.

If you are a screen reader user or a sighted user who wants to experience more accessibility features in Word, try out the new gesture check feature. Let us know how it works for you! Are there other scenarios where gesture check is useful? Let us know about those, too!

For accessibility support, please visit: Microsoft Disability Answer Desk To learn more.

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