Hi all,At the workplace, I use Microsoft Excel and JAWS. At home, I use Calc and Orca. It's important for me the same features are available independent on the operational system or the screen reader. Since I can save my files in Excel format, it seemed too simply to do what I do. However, I found a difficult. In Calc, with Orca, I was not able to select items in a dropdown placed over the cells.
Attached to this message, you can find a sheet of example. Imagine you are the boss and wish control the tasks assigned to your team. The table in plan1 does exactly it. It's enough to fill date, task, responsible, area and the status.
But it's necessary to constrain the values typed on the cells. My boss loves the autofilter. If anyone types values out of the standard, the autofilter can't be used. If someone types "John" and another one types "John Stuart", in spite of the fact they are the same people, Calc will understand that they are different values, difficulting the filtering.
To solve this problem, in our sheets, it's common to implement validation. For example, if I know the names of people who can receive tasks, we create a validity rule. At menu Data, we can select the option "validity" and, in the tab criteria, we can define the limited list among which a value will be selected. Over the cell, a dropdown is placed. With mouse or keybord, we can select one of the values and if we type a value out of the list, a error message is shown. It's really a wonderful feature.
The problem is: having created the dropdown, when I move the cursor into a cell, Orca doesn't say anything about the presence of a dropdown. But even if I know a dropdown exists, I could not select items directly. It's necessary to call the context menu and select the option regarding the selection of items in a dropdown. But even using this method, I can control the selection of items. After pressing enter on this option, a list is opend, but Orca doesn't say anything. If I use the arrows and press enter, probabily I will assign a value to that cell, but it's not possible to predict which value will be selected.
Using JAWS, I can easily select the items. When I enter in the cell, JAWS says "dropdown". So I know there is a dropdown over this cell. I press ctrl+downarrow and with up and down arrow, I can select the items. It would be wonderful if Orca behaves like that.
There are dropdowns in cells of responsible, area and status columns. In date column, there is also a validation. Dates before 01/01/2011 is not allowed, but in this case, their there is no dropdowns.
In the attached document, I filled values in two rows as a example. But, since I could not select values in the dropdown, I typed the values that I previously knew. Would someone know how to fill more rows selecting responsibles, areas and status in the dropdown? Can Orca announce the presence of dropdowns in a cell? What do you suggest?
Regards, Luciano de Souza
Attachment:
Dropdown example.ods
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet