office-gobmx/winaccessibility
Michael Weghorn 1ab8cc73e0 wina11y: Drop duplicate handling for focusable state
Setting the `isFocusable` var to true and
calling `IncreaseState` for the focusable state
further down is unnecessary, as that already happens
in the line just below the variable is set.

Therefore, drop this duplication.

In addition, the now dropped call to `IncreaseState`
should have used the UNO state, AccessibleStateType::FOCUSABLE
as well, not the IAccessible state, STATE_SYSTEM_FOCUSABLE,
as AccObject::IncreaseState takes the UNO state while
CMAccessible::IncreaseState (called by the former)
takes the IAccessible/MSAA state.
The switch from the UNO to the IAccessible2 state for
the param was accidently done in

    commit a241661862
    Author: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de>
    Date:   Mon Sep 30 13:37:14 2024 +0100

        wina11y: Bridge focusable state as is

Change-Id: I4b3923897444fdc75b15fe2cd9e91ba5f405507e
Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/174341
Reviewed-by: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de>
Tested-by: Jenkins
2024-10-01 17:48:04 +02:00
..
inc wina11y: Rename UNO_MSAA_UNMAPPING to MSAA_NO_STATE 2024-09-30 21:40:28 +02:00
source wina11y: Drop duplicate handling for focusable state 2024-10-01 17:48:04 +02:00
CustomTarget_ia2_idl.mk
Library_uacccom.mk wina11y: Merge CAccComponent{,Base} 2024-09-17 07:51:14 +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.