office-gobmx/winaccessibility
Michael Weghorn 97a88e30e2 tdf#100086 tdf#124832 wina11y: Implement IAccessibleTableCell
Add a new class 'AccTableCell' that implements the
IAccessibleTableCell interface from the IAccessible2 spec
and add what's needed to expose it to accessibility tools
via COM.

Since there's no specific XInterface for table cells
that an XAccessible's context could be queried for,
make use of the fact that a table cell's
parent is a table, i.e. its accessible context implements
XAccessibleTable.

AccTableCell keeps a reference to that table and remembers the
cell's index in the parent to retrieve information
on the cell from there.

This addresses the

> At least for LibreOffice Table Cells don't implement
> IAccessibleTableCell, and therefore there's no way to get the row and
> column span. LibreOffice itself also does not expose the merged state in
> the accessible name of the cell.

comment from [1] (which is the NVDA counterpart for LO's
tdf#124832) and may also help for tdf#100086,
though more work will be needed on LibreOffice and/or NVDA
side for both issues.

[1] https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/9310

Change-Id: I0f53212d14ee17c760b9e6c91be2154a1b25d862
Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/121821
Tested-by: Jenkins
Reviewed-by: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de>
2021-09-08 20:06:00 +02:00
..
inc
source tdf#100086 tdf#124832 wina11y: Implement IAccessibleTableCell 2021-09-08 20:06:00 +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.