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Search should display the number of results it finds #6319
Description
when the search term is not found, pressing enter on the find dialog announces nothing. It would be ideal if some message was announced to the effect that it was not found.
When it is found, NVDA reads the search term. I find that this behaviour is not that intuitive.
What does work well is that when escaping out of the find dialog, NVDA's review cursor is positioned at the starting position of the match for you to review around it.
Originally posted by Dickson Tan (@Neurrone) in #5421 (comment)
Additional Details
With regards to accessibility, UIA should at least somehow notify the user that no results were found.
With regards to general UX, this kind of notification should be revealed in/near the search box. It would be cool if we could say something like "4 of 42 Results" and change it to "No Results" if none are found. But at the very least, somehow displaying "No Results" would be very useful.
Though we could just implement the accessibility approach, if we managed to implement the second approach instead, we would basically get accessibility for free.
(another approach) I think some apps would do some kind of noise when no result was found (though I think that's a bit of an older approach, correct me if I'm wrong). That would be another approach that would "bridge the gap" and solve this problem too.
Activity
Neurrone commentedon Jun 3, 2020
Lets avoid that if possible. Some apps like notepad do that for example, but also pop up a dialog saying that nothing is found.
Don-Vito commentedon Dec 14, 2020
Dustin L. Howett (@DHowett), Carlos Zamora (@carlos-zamora) - I have a PoC for the number of results + interactive behavior (search upon every box modification).
I am not sure how severe are the performance implications on a very large buffer - to count the number of results I need to iterate all over all matches to count them (actually I also store them to prevent additional searches). If we are going to productize this, probably we can introduce some threshold on the size of buffer / number of matches beyond which we will show question marks, something like "2000 of ?".
I lost several hours trying to implement live highlighting of all matches (with another color).. eventually I dieded.. (I guess changing renderer interface is still beyond my level).
DHowett commentedon Dec 14, 2020
Let's not do highlighting just yet. There's some changes to the renderer we've been mulling over that might make it easier to implement down the road.
DHowett commentedon Dec 14, 2020
I'm totally fine with productizing the match counter, however. That's really neat.
Don-Vito commentedon Dec 14, 2020
What do you say about the feature flag - required or not?
I already introduced one in the draft, but it kinda doubles the code due to:
13 remaining items
Make the SearchBox announce if it found results or not (#12301)
Use ICU for text search (#15858)
Show number of search results & positions of hits in scrollbar (#14045)