musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Confusing Excess Speech Output when attempting to Navigate in a way that isn't possible.

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#30,463 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@shoogle is already working on this.

Since Nov 5, 2025.

accessibility needs review regression MS4
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Description

Issue type

Accessibility issue (e.g. for keyboard-only or screen reader users)

Description with steps to reproduce

When you try to navigate in a way that is not possible the speech used to say “blank” (see 20732). Since the 4.6 update it now has confusing and excessive speech.
I’ve opened this as a new issue so it can be reviewed as a regression as it is quite different output to the original issue and this excess speech is quite difficult to work with, the “blank” was not a high priority.

It seems to be stating the function of the key press in each situation.

  1. Place focus on the first note or rest of the score and press left arrow.
    You hear “Previous Chord/Shift Text Left”
  2. Place the focus on the last note/rest of the score and press right arrow.
    You hear “Next Chord/Shift Text Right”
  3. Place focus on the top score on the highest note of a chord/top voice and press Alt up arrow. You hear “Up Note in Chord”.
  4. Place focus on the bottom note of bottom staff and Press Alt down arrow and you hear “Down Note in Chord”

Ideally this could state something concise like “Start”, “End”, “Top, “Bottom, or as there are other instances could it make a system sound, the quiet bong that Microsoft uses when you can’t do an action would be better for this and all other cases. All users would hear this as it wouldn’t be screen reader specific, but might be useful to all. Failing these having no output at all would be better than a load of confusing excess speech.

Supporting files, videos and screenshots

N/A

In which versions of MuseScore Studio is this issue present?

4.6.1

Regression

Yes, this used to work in a previous version of MuseScore 4.x

Operating system

Windows 11 with NVDA

Additional context

No response

Checklist
  • This report follows the guidelines for reporting bugs and issues
  • I have verified that this issue has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar issues
  • I have attached all requested files and information to this report
  • I have attempted to identify the root problem as concisely as possible, and have used minimal reproducible examples where possible

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