office-gobmx/winaccessibility
Michael Weghorn 1b94deea2c tdf#100086 wina11y: Return "fresh" IEnumVARIANT for get_accSelection
Create a clone and reset the IEnumVariant returned
in 'CMAccessible::get_accSelection'
when multiple children are selected.

It seems reasonable to assume that an 'IEnumVARIANT'
retrieved by calling the 'IAccessible::get_accSelection' [1]
method to get access to the selected children will
start enumerating selected children at the beginning,
not where enumeration left off with any previously
retrieved 'IEnumVARIANT'.

I came across this because a pending NVDA pull request
to implement the announcement of multiple selected Calc cells
mentions that "accSelection is broken in LibreOffice" [2].

NVDA uses 'IAccessible::get_accSelection' and then
'IEnumVARIANT::Next' to get the amount of currently
selected cells.

However, with the same underlying 'CMAccessible' object
being used in subsequent attempts to retrieve the count
of selected children and its 'm_lCurrent' member not
being reset in between, this effectively meant that children
considered when retrieving the selection the previous time
were considered as "already having been taken into account"
when (not) looping over the children to return in
'CEnumVariant::Next'.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleacc/nf-oleacc-iaccessible-get_accselection
[2] b9f7ee1c2a

Change-Id: I8e6b8bffaab010a0cfa7db8d43807e7520673d45
Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/122268
Tested-by: Jenkins
Reviewed-by: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de>
2021-09-18 09:06:54 +02:00
..
inc wina11y: Get rid of more HWND<->sal_Int64 casting 2021-09-17 07:05:46 +02:00
source tdf#100086 wina11y: Return "fresh" IEnumVARIANT for get_accSelection 2021-09-18 09:06:54 +02:00
CustomTarget_ia2_idl.mk
Library_uacccom.mk tdf#100086 tdf#124832 wina11y: Implement IAccessibleTableCell 2021-09-08 20:06:00 +02:00
Library_winaccessibility.mk
Makefile
Module_winaccessibility.mk
README.md
WinResTarget_uacccom.mk

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.