Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] libreoffice and UI automation

On 2026-05-17 21:56, Josh Kennedy wrote:
> Does libreoffice use UI-automation for screen reader and document
> accessibility?  

For Windows, LibreOffice currently implements an IAccessible2 
accessibility bridge, not a UIA (UI Automation) one.

Windows provides some MSAA to UIA proxy (see 
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/uiauto-implementinglegacyiaccessible 
). So at least some level of UIA support exists via that. But this is 
limited to whatever that proxy implements and not really under 
LibreOffice's control.
(As far as I know, only MSAA/IAccessible is supported by that proxy, not 
the additional semantics that the IAccessible2 API adds on top of that.)

> If not, are there any plans to switch over to it?

The current development version of LibreOffice includes changes to 
implement experimental support for optionally using the so-called "qt6 
vcl plugin" on Windows as well (see e.g. commit 
https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/4d3a291b5d2d8a2dbdae5aca0d5fd506b5d5b0b9 
). In case of using that, the Qt toolkit would be used under the hood, 
which would imply using the UIA implementation provided by Qt instead of 
LibreOffice's custom IAccessible2 bridge. In case that approach were 
pursued further, that might be a potential way to get UIA support 
without relying on Microsoft's MSAA to UIA proxy in the future.

> Would it make documents and the whole app more accessible?
How accessible LibreOffice is mostly depends on whether LibreOffice 
provides the relevant information on the accessibility layer and 
whether/how screen readers/assistive technology process it.

For most aspects, my expectation is that both IAccessible2 and UIA 
provide the necessary API required to make things accessible if both, 
LibreOffice and assistive technology implement what is needed.
So it really depends on the level of support for both protocols/APIs 
that the involved software supports.
From the accessibility issues I've seen reported in Bugzilla so far, I 
don't think they are a limitation of IAccessible2 and could be solved 
)by corresponding implementations in LibreOffice and assistive 
technology) without requiring a switch to UIA.
NVDA for example supports both, IAccessibl2 and UIA. If a certain 
assistive technology only supports UIA, that's a different story of course.

Ticket https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160982 and 
the commit linked from it contain some additional information.


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