Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] some issues with screen reader accessibility

Hi Jean-Philippe,

On 2023-10-07 06:19, Jean-Philippe MENGUAL wrote:
> Nice to start chatting with you, I heard of you at Libocon via COlomban 
> you met there and worling with my organization. I am glad if I can help 
> you working on LO accessibility given the high needed job. For your 
> info, as a "power user"/tester, I mainly use Linux and I use Libreoffice 
> latest stable (in Sid on Debian). Hypa uses an older one due to bugs 
> that COlomban will show you, but the bug tracker mentions most of them, 
> reported by me and my former colleague.

great to hear from you and thanks a lot for the work so far, your input 
and offer to help further. I'm looking forward to continue working together!

I'd definitely be interested in hearing what regressions are currently 
preventing Hypra from updating to a current LibreOffice version.
(There are currently more than 200 accessibility-related tickets in 
Bugzilla; knowing which are the ones that Hypra considers blockers would 
be helpful.)

> Actually I think something needs to be explained: using screen readers 
> like Orca or NVDA, we consider as accessible information what may be 
> reached via the caret, ie. what you can move with tab key or the arrow 
> keys. Using advanced features to access to the information, eg. object 
> navigation or flat review, is not optimal. It might work, but not 
> everybody know it and is it considered as a kind of hack to workaround 
> accessibility limitations.

For dialogs that present information without allowing to change 
anything, like the case of the word count dialog ("Tools" -> "Word 
Count") discussed here:
Would you still expect to be able to navigate within the dialog text 
using tab or arrow keys?
Or would the expectation rather be that the dialog content is announced 
by the screen reader automatically when the dialog gets shown?
So far, I was thinking more about the latter. This would also match the 
current behavior of other info/warning dialogs, like the one that gets 
shown when closing the document with unsaved changes.

> > > I think that's a screen reader issue. You should probably report it 
> > > to NVDA.
>
> Unfortunately I am not sure. I Cc Joanmarie Diggs, main Orca developer, 
> who can confirm or give you technical explanations. DOnt hesitate to 
> subscribe to the orca mailing list where all the community activity 
> takes place:
> https://www.freelists.org/list/orca
>
> I think if the screen reader is unable to announce a mismelled word 
> while speaking the current line or saying all the document, it is 
> because it does not get the info from the accessibilit tree.

That sounds plausible. As mentioned in my previous email, I'm planning 
to take a closer look at this. Since it works with other applications 
(like Word or Thunderbird) and NVDA is free and open source, too, I'm 
optimistic that it'll be possible to identify what's missing on either 
LibreOffice or NVDA side.
(According to Jason, this already works as expected with Orca on Linux.)

Best regards,
Michael

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