Remove strange blue box in visual studio

Question

Bluebox microsoft devilspawn

This blue rectangle is fixed on the screen. Sometimes growing, shrinking and changing place.

tried the answer to this question: In the Visual Studio SQL editor, how do I get rid of the boxes? as I thought it might be related but didn't help. How to get rid of it?

If you go to Tools -> Options -> Environment -> General and change the Color Theme to something else, does it go away or does it remain? — VictorySaber, Mar 03 '14 at 15:54
it might be worth mentioning that it was running in parallels on mac os. Not really an answer to the question but restarting the windows instance on parallels removed it. — springbo, Mar 03 '14 at 19:19

score 108 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 27 '18 at 10:37

108

The box is drawn by Windows' Narrator feature for people with low vision. I recently accidentally toggled this myself by hitting winkey+enter. Hitting it again and moving the mouse cursor seems to toggle it back off again as well.

As mentioned below, depending on the narrator shortcuts configured on your system one of the following may work:

winkey+enter.
caps lock+esc

Full overview of narrator hot keys can be found here.

edited Jul 27 '18 at 10:37

Community

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answered Mar 06 '14 at 18:10

jessehouwing

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Thank you! I accidentally did this and couldn't figure out what I had done. – Douglas Jones Jun 30 '14 at 18:34
Cheers. I knew I hit the windows key just, but could not work out which over key I hit to trigger this. – JonWillis Mar 21 '15 at 19:59
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This needs to be marked as the correct answer, this was driving me nuts! – mcdrummerman May 17 '15 at 21:34
Thanks! You just saved my nite! – dumduke Nov 23 '15 at 10:41
Thanks, this helped me. Not sure if it is limited to running windows 10 in VM on mac but if CMD + Enter does not hide the Narrator block you can disable Narrator in Ease of Access settings -> Narrator. In my case after disabling Narrator the blue block still showed and I had to kill the Narrator process in Task manager. – Kobus Kleynhans Aug 07 '17 at 09:54
See below, for alternative - CapsLock + Esc – rediVider Mar 02 '18 at 18:30

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 14 '17 at 10:46

4

For some reason Winkey + Enter didn't work for me. However I found Caps Lock + Esc did the trick. See Narrator Shortcuts for more info

answered Aug 14 '17 at 10:46

ChrisG

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tHIS WORKED FOR ME – fuLLMetaLMan Sep 07 '17 at 06:51

score -7 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 06 '14 at 18:29

-7

It looks like you have an extension installed which is adding that box. Try disabling extensions until you find the one that is causing this

Tools -> Options -> Extension Manager

answered Mar 06 '14 at 18:29

JaredPar

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Remove strange blue box in visual studio

3 Answers3