office-gobmx/winaccessibility
Michael Weghorn 38e2dde00d tdf#154039 wina11y: Increase refcount for returned COM interface
The reference counter for the IUnknown interface
of the COM object needs to be increased in
`CMAccessible::get_accSelection` as well,
not just in the called `CEnumVariant::Next`,
because calling VariantClear` on the temporary
variant afterwards decreases the ref count again.

Regression from

    commit 00c0ee8cf0
    Author: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de>
    Date:   Mon Jan 31 07:41:14 2022 +0000

        tdf#147083 wina11y: Return a11y object instead of child ID

Change-Id: Id968c3d80b38961b836fbb1a9bd6dfeefdff813f
Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/148393
Tested-by: Jenkins
Reviewed-by: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de>
2023-03-07 14:47:25 +00:00
..
inc
source tdf#154039 wina11y: Increase refcount for returned COM interface 2023-03-07 14:47:25 +00:00
CustomTarget_ia2_idl.mk wina11y: Drop unused AccessibleKey{Binding,Stroke}.idl 2022-08-05 17:35:16 +02:00
Library_uacccom.mk wina11y: Report actual app/toolkit name/version 2022-09-10 07:21:17 +02:00
Library_winaccessibility.mk
Makefile
Module_winaccessibility.mk Clean up dead uses of DISABLE_ATL 2019-01-24 21:23:56 +01:00
README.md Updated README.md files to represent current code / use Markdown format 2021-04-07 17:47:16 +02:00
WinResTarget_uacccom.mk prefer makefile-gmake-mode 2014-04-28 23:35:42 +09:00

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.