2018-11-14 20:59:57

Hi folks,
I have been using NVDA for about a year and a half now and I have always had trouble reading long documents.  If a document is lengthy  I experience some delay between pressing Ctrl and down before the next paragraph is read.  Same thing for words and characters.
At first this was only in very long pdf's that are over 500 pages, but lately this has started happening in word too.

In the past I just converted the PDF's to word and then read it from there.  However, lately word is even worse than Adobe.  It is so slow it is impractical to read anything in word.  I can't use it to edit documents anymore either.

This might have started when I installed Office 365, I am not sure.
Does anyone know if there is a common cause for this slowdown?

Just in case PC specs might be the issue, I am running an i7 with 8GB DDR3 RAM, definitely enough for a word document to work properly.  Also, this issue persists on both my laptop and desktop, so I doubt it has anything to do with my hardware, more likely my NVDA config or Word itself. 
It is not the case with all text editors.  I don't have the same issue when using Libre Office Writer.  The issue is mainly in MS Word. 

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

2018-11-14 21:29:56

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2018-11-14 23:13:14

It's a little difficult to determine the causes of this behaviour.
Firstly, when did you encounter the problem for the first time? Considering the description of your computer and also its specifications, there seems no reason why the behaviour of NVDA should be so problematic. I have a computer with a slower processor and NVDA+Word seem to get along well even with long documents.
Secondly, does the problem occur only with a particular document or with all documents you work with? Sometimes, the structure of the document may cause lag on the screen reader and Word itself.
Thirdly, have you tried reading the document with another screen reader other than NVDA?

2018-11-15 06:22:28

I also have the same issue in word with long documents, but only with some documents. Other documents can be longer but still read fine. I really don't know what makes the difference, but I suspect it might have something to do with formatting, because when I just type out a document without doing anything else it can get pretty long but still work fine with NVDA. But for some reason when I insert references with endnote, it gets slow, but only if they're not formatted, not when using the temporary unformatted citations. Also, when getting a document from someone else where I can tell things have been done with the layout or formatting of the document it also tends to be slow with NVDA.
As for pdfs, if you have a very long pdf in adobe and you open it as a single page it can take forever, but when reading it as separate pages it should be fine. Consider getting qread though, it's very good with pdfs, and can open long documents quickly. And I've never had NVDA being slow with it, it's like reading plain text.
https://q-continuum.net/qread/

2018-11-15 19:49:41

I have heard good things about Q-read, I will consider getting it.
As for when this started, like I said in my initial post, I am not sure.  It might have started when I upgraded my office from a very old office 2007 to office 365.  It might also be worth mentioning that I also had this problem in office 2007, however, it started gradually and got worse as I went through the document.  So it would read the first 20 or so pages I read faster than the second 20 pages I read.  This happens regardless of where I start reading, so back then I remedied it by closing the document and re-opening it once it started getting too slow to bare.

I agree that additional formatting makes it worse.  The issue is definitely not unique to one document, but things like study material converted from PDF to word format is a lot slower than long documents I drafted myself. 

I read about this issue on several forums but never saw a solution that actually worked for me.  It seems like other people are aware of the issue, but no one can pin down the cause.  I have friends who have the same NVDA configs and use the same add-ons but do not have this issue.  It would have thought it unique to my PC if I did not have the exact same problem on my Laptop.

As for using different screen readers.  Well I only have narrator besides NVDA and that is always slow.  I ran them in unison and NVDA was still faster, but admittedly that test was stupid and I doubt it proved anything.

It is a shame though because I am trying to make very large sets of notes.  I copy and paste and chop and change from various sources compiling everything into one set of notes.  I am sitting with the problem that word is so slow that I can't bare to read the notes I have made and if I import those to Libre Office it freezes up completely.  I am having a difficult time working like this.

2018-11-16 01:59:46

Hello,

one thing you could try is taking your notes in a text editor. For example take notes in Notepad or something. If you don't need to publish or share your notes with anyone, you would be able to take notes without having to deal with the slowness of MS.

I know this doesn't fix the problem, but it might allow you to still get work done. You could also let the NVDA guys know about your problem. Maybe they can look in to it.

2018-11-17 09:29:49

Unfortunately the formatting of MS word is exactly why I use it, so just switching to notepad would defeat the purpose.
As for telling the NVDA devs about it, I read about this issue on one of their forums, so i am sure they are aware of it.
Thanks for the suggestions though.

2018-11-17 20:04:15

Could you try a demo of JAWS and see how it performs with that document? JAWS has a better support for Word.

2018-11-18 18:29:42 (edited by Munawar 2018-11-18 18:31:59)

This is a hot topic on the NVDA GitHub. People suggest turning off page number tracking. I had the same issue as you when I was writing a technical paper for work. I had many cross-references and all that; the document was only about 20 pages long but still NVDA performed horribly. I turned off page number tracking in NVDA and it solved it.

The bad thing is that this is not a solution, only a work-around. NVDA's codebase needs to be optimized to handle large documents better. I have a feeling they're just brute-forcing it for now, but obviously there needs to be some serious optimization done to NVDA.

I agree with afrim and JAWS having better support for Office. Indeed, it's one of the reasons I miss JAWS (the only reason, in fact.)

I'd like to add that I've experienced horrible slow-down on a 2.9 GHZ machine with a Core I-7 quad core CPU with an SSD. This is a system I use heavily at work, and it's so fast it loads Visual Studio in under 5 seconds. So the issue here is NVDA IMO, not Word or your system.

2018-11-18 23:15:42

You can disable "pages" in NVDA menu / preferences / settings / document formating settings. Then, change in MS Word the view to web layout or to draft or plain. You will notice that MS word gets much faster.

Please make also sure that you disabled all add-ins in MS Word. You can find all add-ins by opening the file ribbon, going to "options" and then to add-ins or in security center.

2018-11-19 08:48:17

Hello,If I change the view will the formatting of the document be affected?

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2018-11-19 10:50:57

Hello,
@Burak, no, the formatting of the document doesn't change, but the reading experience does. The different reading layout views are optimised for different purposes; the reading layout view, for instance, is designed to create a trouble-free reading experience where the whole ribbon menu disappears and the document loads in two-page view, giving the screen the form of a book. This reading view used to be accessible in earlier versions of Word, but in Word 2016, it doesn't seem to work with NVDA at all. Whenever NVDA was slow in reading any document, I would switch to this reading view and it would work considerably faster. However, the limitation of reading layout view is that you can only read, not edit the document.
I think NV Access should consider working more on the support of NVDA with Word. I used NVDA for four months without any interruption and had to go back to JAWS when the university started simply for this reason. I think they should focus on enhancing the reading experience, particularly on creating reading patterns that indicate where the title of a section is or where a new paragraph begins. Another area I think NV Access should consider is what I call obtaining information from the document. The user should be given the opportunity to obtain information on different parameters of the document, such as the current page, the current line and the overall number of lines of the page you are focused on, the language of the document, word count, and much more I can't think of right now. These enhancements definitely improve user experience and will turn out to attract more users towards NVDA.

2018-11-19 16:17:29

Hi @afrim, most of the information you mention can be gotten by pressing the status line command (NVDA+SHIFT+END).

As for overall support of Word, I agree 100%. I'd love to see something like JAWS' document proof option where it can detect extra spaces and all that. NVDA behavior in the options dialog is sluggish at best, unreliable in worst-cases.

Their philosophy is open-source first and I have a feeling this is why Word hasn't gotten the type of attention FS gives it. They should realize though that this is harming those of us in professional settings.

I'm glad you had the option to switch to JAWS for these types of enterprise-level applications. I've always maintained that when it comes to business-grade software, JAWS far, far out-performs NVDA and it's why now with their home license I'm considering switching.

2018-11-19 21:24:28

@Munawar, thanks so much for the tip, I will check it out.

2018-11-22 22:41:09

please let me know if it works.
I have the same problem with long documents.
I am reading legal congress reports and they tend to be 40 pages.
I also have this when moving from paragraph to paragraph and the length of the actual paragraph is about half a page.
It just started one week ago.