WPF: How to get screen readers to ignore progress bar status updates?

Question

Recently, I have been trying to get the built-in Windows 7 narrator/screen reader to be compatible with my WPF app. There is very little info about this, but what I have read is that I can set an attached property (AutomationProperties.HelpText, AutomationProperties.AutomationID).

The problem I am having is that the UI contains a progress bar and the current progress value is periodically read out by the screen reader as it changes. In this case, reading out the progress is not desirable but I cannot find a way to turn this off. I thought maybe I could set this by accessing the AutomationPeer associated with the element, but this doesn't seem to be the case (I can force an event to be raised, but I cannot have it ignore an event).

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

Answer 1

This is something that's typically controlled by the screenreader itself, via user settings/options, not something you can do at the application level. Narrator, which comes with Windows, is a fairly basic screenreader; think of it more like a notepad or wordpad level compared to a screenreader like Jaws or NVDA, which are more like Word. Narrator has minimal options, while the other two likely have all sorts of options that the user can use to customize when the screenreader speaks out specific events.

So, long story short; there's nothing you can do here. Ensure that the events are sent, that way a screenreader can chose to read them or not read them, as the user directs.

Also, keep in mind that Narrator is a basic screenreader, most users will actually be using something like Jaws (which costs $800 or so) or NVDA (free!), so consider testing with those to get a closer feel for what a real-world screenreader user would experience.