Bug 167697 - Android Viewer is not screen reader accessible
Summary: Android Viewer is not screen reader accessible
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Android Viewer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
25.8.0.0 alpha0+
Hardware: All All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: accessibility
Depends on:
Blocks: a11y, Accessibility
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Reported: 2025-07-28 10:03 UTC by Michael Weghorn
Modified: 2025-07-28 10:04 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Michael Weghorn 2025-07-28 10:03:45 UTC 
Currently, document content in LibreOffice Viewer for Android is not accessible to assistive technology like screen readers.

Quoting a Google Play Review:

> it needs improvement. I am a screenreader user and when I open any document the text of the document shows in an an inaccessible way which the screenreader doesn't read. make it more accessible for the blind users.

This is related to the tiled rendering approach used by Android Viewer:
The app only receives tiles/images of the document, which means they don't contain the semantics of text and document structure.

There was work done for Collabora Online to add semantic information for a11y in this NLNet funded project:

https://nlnet.nl/project/LO-Accessible/

Potentially, the LibreOfficeKit part of this could somehow be (re)used in Android Viewer as well, but at least the client side is still missing.

Current master (where the above problem applies) is 4caf129378204a74da7fa226870d97a44cc142ff.
Comment 1 Michael Weghorn 2025-07-28 10:04:13 UTC 
Self-confirming as the issue was originally reproduced by another user (in a Google Play review).