office-gobmx/winaccessibility
Stephan Bergmann db3a61cd95 Generally determine Rdb content from gb_*_set_componentfile calls
...instead of by listing the content somewhat redundantly in the Rdb_*.mk
files, to avoid duplication of logic for components that are only built
conditionally (and thus should only be included conditionally in the
corresponding Rdb).  To achieve that, add an "rdb" parameter to
gb_ComponentTarget_ComponentTarget (and to the gb_*_set_componentfile macros
that internally call gb_ComponentTarget_ComponentTarget), which is used to make
the appropriate gb_Rdb_add_component call internally from within
gb_ComponentTarget_ComponentTarget.  (As a special case,
gb_CppunitTest_set_componentfile shall not call gb_Rdb_add_component, as that
has already been done by the corresponding gb_Library_set_componentfile call, so
allow the gb_ComponentTarget_ComponentTarget "rdb" parameter to be empty to
support that special case.)

Most Rdb_*.mk files are thus mostly empty now.  One exception is
i18npool/Rdb_saxparser.mk, which duplicates some of the Rdb_services content as
needed during the build in CustomTarget_i18npool/localedata.

1c9a40299d "gbuild: create services.rdb from built
components" had already tried to do something similar (in addition to other
things) under a new --enable-services-rdb-from-build option.  However, that
approach had four drawbacks that this approach here addresses (and which thus
partly reverts 1c9a40299d):

1  Rdb_services shall not contain the component files of all libraries that are
built.  While that commit filtered out the component files that go into
Rdb_ure/services (ure/Rdb_ure.mk), it failed to filter out the component files
that go into others like Rdb_postgresql-sdbc
(connectivity/Rdb_postgresql-sdbc.mk).

2  The code added by that commit to Makefile.gbuild codified the knowledge that
there is an Rdb_services, which is brittle.

3  The code added by that commit to solenv/gbuild/Rdb.mk codified the knowledge
(for gb_Rdb__URECOMPONENTS) that there is an Rdb_ure/services, which is brittle.

4  Introducing an --enable-services-rdb-from-build option needlessly provided
two different ways how the content of Rdb_services is assembled.

The changes done here would leave --enable-services-rdb-from-build as a
misnomer, as it no longer controls how Rdb_services is assembled.  I thus
renamed it to --enable-customtarget-components, as that is apparently what it
still does now.

Change-Id: Ia5e8df4b640146c77421fcec6daa11a9cd260265
Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126577
Tested-by: Jenkins
Reviewed-by: Stephan Bergmann <sbergman@redhat.com>
2021-12-10 08:14:24 +01:00
..
inc loplugin:nullptr (clang-cl) 2021-10-01 08:32:40 +02:00
source loplugin:stringviewparam 2021-11-26 09:45:34 +01:00
CustomTarget_ia2_idl.mk GBUILD_TRACE, support for finding out where the build time is spent 2020-02-16 14:49:45 +01:00
Library_uacccom.mk tdf#100086 tdf#124832 wina11y: Implement IAccessibleTableCell 2021-09-08 20:06:00 +02:00
Library_winaccessibility.mk Generally determine Rdb content from gb_*_set_componentfile calls 2021-12-10 08:14:24 +01:00
Makefile
Module_winaccessibility.mk
README.md Updated README.md files to represent current code / use Markdown format 2021-04-07 17:47:16 +02:00
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.