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

Hi,


Le 07/10/2023 à 23:25, Michael Weghorn a écrit :
> 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.)

Yes, COlomban is working for this. I gave him my nputs, he now tries to 
give a better technical base and reproduction scenarios. To sum up my 
current feeling, the main problems is the style dialog, where browsing 
with the caret is very difficult to edit and tweak styles, the browser 
(f5) whose behaviour is not stable, and some dialogs where browing is 
very hard (eg. this to number chapters, in Tools menu). The style dialog 
being the most problematic as what is sent to the accessibility infra is 
really difficult to use for a screen reader, I tried to run an automated 
test suite producing code to reproduce scenarios from the at-spi events 
and this dialog sent really not relevant info.

> > 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?

Yes. In comparison, in Thunderbird, when having a dialog (a question for 
instance), the caret can switch to OK, Cancel, and the message box, 
enabling to say it. Of course in such case not other ineraction is 
possible, but the movement is and makes it accessible.

> Or would the expectation rather be that the dialog content is announced 
> by the screen reader automatically when the dialog gets shown?

I think such behavior would be acceptable, but when the user needs to 
repeat the info, it is always more simple if he can see it via tab or 
keys I think. Screen readers dont't have always a feature to repeat the 
last message and the last message may be interrupted by another (a 
notification, a movement on the keyboard without consequence, etc)

> 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.

Right, same problem, in particular, for example, when the filename is 
not friendly for a speech synth, requiring repeating.

> > > > 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.

Great, many thanks

Best regards

> (According to Jason, this already works as expected with Orca on Linux.)
>
> Best regards,
> Michael

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