Ribbon Menu

• Author: Alexandru Vida, based on RibbonExplorer by Alberto Buffolino
• Download latest release
• NVDA compatibility: 2019.3 and beyond (developed and tested on NVDA 2026.2, 64 bit)
• License: GNU General Public License v2

A NVDA add-on that lets you navigate the Microsoft Office Ribbon as if it were a classic menu: arrows, Enter and Escape, like in the menus of old Office versions. No extra software or Office customization is needed.

It works with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and classic Outlook (Microsoft 365 and Office 2019/2021), including contextual tabs, ribbon tabs added by add-ins (Acrobat, Copilot, Claude, etc.) and the "More commands" overflow menus of the simplified ribbon. Nothing is hard-coded: the add-on reads the Ribbon as it is, so customized tabs and groups are handled like the built-in ones.

Ribbon Menu is a fork of Alberto Buffolino's RibbonExplorer, which is no longer maintained; all credit for the design and the original code goes to him.

Usage

Open an Office application and press Alt to enter the Ribbon: the tabs are presented as a menu bar.

• Left and Right arrows move between tabs; Down arrow or Enter opens a tab;
• Up and Down arrows move between the items of an open tab or submenu; Right arrow enters a group or expands a control, Left arrow goes back to the parent;
• Enter activates the current item (or expands it, when it has a submenu); Alt+Down arrow and Alt+Up arrow expand and collapse controls;
• Escape goes up one level at a time, like in classic menus; at the tab bar, Escape leaves the Ribbon;
• NVDA+Space, while you are in the Ribbon, turns the add-on off: the Ribbon stays native, through task panes, dialogs and window switches, until NVDA+Space inside the Ribbon turns the add-on back on. Restarting NVDA also brings it back. The gesture is only active inside the Ribbon and does not affect NVDA+Space elsewhere, for example in Word documents.

Updates

Ribbon Menu is distributed through the NVDA Add-on Store, which takes care of updates like for any other add-on.

If you still have the old RibbonExplorer add-on installed, uninstall it first: both add-ons would try to handle the same keys.

Changes

1.1.0

• New, optional virtual ribbon engine (experimental, NVDA settings, Ribbon Menu category): navigation moves over photographs of the ribbon taken through UI Automation, so arrows never touch Office - announcement is immediate at every depth, Escape always goes up exactly one level, and activation happens with a real click on the real control. The whole Backstage (File) is served as menu levels, with incremental reading of long lists such as the folder pickers. Position, submenu state and key tips are announced through NVDA's own settings and language, in speech and braille. Commands that open a task pane (Styles, Office Clipboard, Selection...) land the focus straight in the pane, also when the pane was already open; the engine's waits never freeze NVDA (keys pressed while Office is still building a menu are queued and replayed in order), and Ctrl+Space is absorbed instead of reaching the document. The engine always pre-warms the ribbon in the background and remembers the layout between sessions;
• classic navigation improvements: first-letter navigation like in classic menus (letters no longer trigger Office key tips while exploring), Space works like Enter, Escape goes up one level at a time, submenus and dropdown controls expand through UI Automation directly (fixes items that rejected the focus, such as Language in the Review tab), and a long list of robustness fixes verified by an automated sweep of every tab, group and item of the Word, Excel and PowerPoint ribbons (about 650 spots): serious anomalies went from 38 to zero;
• Outlook compose window: the Microsoft Search box no longer sneaks into the tab row, menu items with dots in their name ("Attach File...") open their menu, and a permanently disabled row member (Copilot without a licence or a Microsoft mailbox) answers with a beep instead of closing the menu;
• NVDA+Space inside the ribbon is a real switch, the same in both modes: it turns the add-on off and the ribbon stays native until NVDA+Space inside the ribbon turns it back on (restarting NVDA also brings it back);
• the built-in update checker is gone: Ribbon Menu is distributed through the NVDA Add-on Store, which takes care of updates; the settings panel is down to a single option;
• Italian translation of the interface completed, with the standard gettext workflow ready for more languages.

1.0.0

• First release of Ribbon Menu, fork of RibbonExplorer 1.0 (February 2024);
• compatibility with NVDA 2026.1 (64 bit); minimum NVDA version raised to 2019.3;
• automatic update check through GitHub Releases, with settings panel and Tools menu entry;
• documentation rewritten, Italian translation added.