Hot #screenReader take: I'll take #VoiceOver's "busy busy busy" over #NVDAsr's "oh god, too much text, baiiii!" any day.
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Hot #screenReader take: I'll take #VoiceOver's "busy busy busy" over #NVDAsr's "oh god, too much text, baiiii!" any day. Absolutely not just NVDA's fault, bit of a product of NVDA + Python + Windows APIs + no doubt a bunch of other things but if I get a "whatever you're trying to do, stop it and return to nominal" button for NVDA for 2026.2 that alone would make me update in an instant. Particularly working with large amount of commandline input is a disaster with this problem occurring practically every few minutes, but other random things, like landing on a window that's hanging or not responding, will do it as well, and if it's the 20th time on a day it can get pretty aggression-inducing.
@zersiax I'm far too familiar with the problem of command lines causing slow-downs and freezes. What are the other problems, though? The only other time I notice odd window focus things is when I open a URL from some apps and get "unknown" instead of a webpage.
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@zersiax I'm far too familiar with the problem of command lines causing slow-downs and freezes. What are the other problems, though? The only other time I notice odd window focus things is when I open a URL from some apps and get "unknown" instead of a webpage.
@alexhall that's an annoying one as well, yes
But there are several instances I can point at where, for example, an interaction happens with the UI of an app and NVDA where either the UI gets in a "not responding" state, after which NVDA freezes, or NVDA freezes because its waiting for something the UI isn't providing with no real way to tell it to give up other than a restart -
@alexhall that's an annoying one as well, yes
But there are several instances I can point at where, for example, an interaction happens with the UI of an app and NVDA where either the UI gets in a "not responding" state, after which NVDA freezes, or NVDA freezes because its waiting for something the UI isn't providing with no real way to tell it to give up other than a restart@zersiax Wow, I can't say I've run into that--yet. It sounds maddening.
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@alexhall that's an annoying one as well, yes
But there are several instances I can point at where, for example, an interaction happens with the UI of an app and NVDA where either the UI gets in a "not responding" state, after which NVDA freezes, or NVDA freezes because its waiting for something the UI isn't providing with no real way to tell it to give up other than a restart@zersiax @alexhall Actually, switching virtual desktops can sometimes unjam it when a window freeze tries to eat it. At least they seem to have mostly fixed the problem where NVDA's keyhook would get eaten all the time! Sometimes it still gets eaten under particularly bad load but usually once the load goes away it can recover itself, before you had to restart it to get it back.
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@zersiax especially when you can cmd tab into another window and it usually keeps working. Same for other screen readers on Windows, I believe Narrator doesn't have this problem either. You can alt tab away and usually be fine.
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@x0 @talon @zersiax Can confirm from what I recall of my time working on Narrator at Microsoft that, as of the time I worked there, all Narrator UIA requests went through a single thread, so yes, that thread could get tied up by an unresponsive window. We did try to mitigate that by setting a short timeout on UIA requests. And NVDA definitely has that same bottleneck. No idea about JAWS.
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@zersiax especially when you can cmd tab into another window and it usually keeps working. Same for other screen readers on Windows, I believe Narrator doesn't have this problem either. You can alt tab away and usually be fine.
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@MostlyBlindGamer @talon Well Safari can have its own things going on. So entitled to always expect a response right away, geez

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@MostlyBlindGamer @talon Well Safari can have its own things going on. So entitled to always expect a response right away, geez

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@x0 @talon @zersiax Can confirm from what I recall of my time working on Narrator at Microsoft that, as of the time I worked there, all Narrator UIA requests went through a single thread, so yes, that thread could get tied up by an unresponsive window. We did try to mitigate that by setting a short timeout on UIA requests. And NVDA definitely has that same bottleneck. No idea about JAWS.
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@MostlyBlindGamer @zersiax @talon I always liked Navigator
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