RE: [libreoffice-accessibility] Using Calc with NVDA screen reader

Hi Chris!

I saw your similar email on the NVDA email list as well as the below on the LO accessibility email 
list.  Michael is correct.  Let me add to this with the following two things.

JAWS has a setting to force the use of MSAA, and NVDA has a setting to force the use of UA (at 
least for MS Word).  I am not sure how these settings interact with LO, but there may be something 
here.

More generally, there is a pending fix in LO (scheduled for version 7.4) and NVDA (scheduled for 
version 2022.1, I think) to address multiple cell selection in Calc.  A fix is required in both 
applications for this.  your reported issue may have something to do with this.

HTH,
Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de> 
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2022 4:46 AM
To: Christopher Mullins <cjmullins29@gmail.com>; accessibility@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] Using Calc with NVDA screen reader

Hi Chris,

welcome to this list and thanks for sharing your experience from using LibreOffice with NVDA. My 
comments on the aspects you mention are inline below.

On 10/01/2022 18.27, Christopher Mullins wrote:
> In Excel, the cell in focus is always selected (highlighted) and if I use Control+c to copy it's 
> value to the clipboard, NVDA will announceCopied to clipboard.  If I do the same thing in Calc, 
> NVDA will announceNo Selectionhowever, the cell value will be copied to the clipboard.  This is 
> also the case if I use Control+Shift+Space toSelect all, all cells are copied to the clipboard 
> but NVDA announcesNo Selectionwhen I press Control+c.

On Windows, there are 2 different technologies that applications can use to implement 
accessibility: UIA (User Interface Automation) and MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility).

Microsoft Office uses UIA, while LibreOffice uses MSAA.

 From what I can see, Excel triggers a UIA notification event after finishing the copy operation 
and NVDA speaks "Copy" as a consequence.
I'm not aware of any equivalent in MSAA, so I think the reason why Excel announces something while 
LibreOffice does not is basically that the two applications are using different technologies to 
implement accessibility.
At least from a technical perspective, that looks OK to me.

> The most annoying issue is how NVDA voices numbers.  I formatted a column as Currency, 2 decimal 
> places, currency symbol £ and leading minus signs on negative numbers.  NVDA does not voice the 
> currency symbol at all, even with symbol verbosity set toAlland trailing zeroes on the fractional 
> side of the decimal point are truncated.

That's actually something that should be improved, and there is already a report for this in 
LibreOffice's issue tracking system, Bugzilla:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115335

Best regards,
Michael

--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: accessibility+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/accessibility/
Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy


-- 
To unsubscribe e-mail to: accessibility+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/accessibility/
Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy