c16158772d
Renaming all README files for all top level modules to README.md, applying no content change at this stage to be able to track history of the files. These files should be edited to use correct Markdown syntax later. Change-Id: I542fa3f3d32072156f16eaad2211a397cc212665 Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/112977 Tested-by: Jenkins Reviewed-by: Christian Lohmaier <lohmaier+LibreOffice@googlemail.com>
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Windows Accessibility Bridge.
This code provides a bridge between our internal Accessibility interfaces (implemented on all visible 'things' in the suite: eg. windows, buttons, entry boxes etc.) - and the Windows MSAA / IAccessible2 COM interfaces that are familiar to windows users and Accessible Technologies (ATs) such as the NVDA screen reader.
The code breaks into three bits:
source/service/ + the UNO service providing the accessibility bridge. It essentially listens to events from the LibreOffice core and creates and synchronises COM peers for our internal accessibility objects when events arrive.
source/UAccCom/ + COM implementations of the MSAA / IAccessible2 interfaces to provide native peers for the accessibility code.
source/UAccCOMIDL/ + COM Interface Definition Language (IDL) for UAccCom.
Here is one way of visualising the code / control flow
VCL <-> UNO toolkit <-> UNO a11y <-> win a11y <-> COM / IAccessible2 vcl/ <-> toolkit/ <-> accessibility/ <-> winaccessibility/ <-> UAccCom/
Threading
It's possible that the UNO components are called from threads other than the main thread, so they have to be synchronized. It would be nice to put the component into a UNO apartment (and the COM components into STA) but UNO would spawn a new thread for it so it's not possible. The COM components also call into the same global AccObjectWinManager as the UNO components do so both have to be synchronized in the same way. So we use the SolarMutex for all synchronization since anything else would be rather difficult to make work. Unfortunately there is a pre-existing problem in vcl with Win32 Window creation and destruction on non-main threads where a synchronous SendMessage is used while the SolarMutex is locked that can cause deadlocks if the main thread is waiting on the SolarMutex itself at that time and thus not handing the Win32 message; this is easy to trigger with JunitTests but hopefully not by actual end users.
Debugging / playing with winaccessibility
If NVDA is running when soffice starts, IA2 should be automatically enabled and work as expected. In order to use 'accprobe' to debug it is necessary to override the check for whether an AT (like NVDA) is running; to do that use:
SAL_FORCE_IACCESSIBLE2=1 soffice.exe -writer
Then you can use accprobe to introspect the accessibility hierarchy remotely, checkout:
http://accessibility.linuxfoundation.org/a11yweb/util/accprobe/
But often it's more useful to look at NVDA's text output window...