Bug 67918 - Writer should not have an isolated AXTextArea for each paragraph
Summary: Writer should not have an isolated AXTextArea for each paragraph
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: UI (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
4.2.0.0.alpha0+ Master
Hardware: Other macOS (All)
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: accessibility
Depends on:
Blocks: a11y-macOS
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Reported: 2013-08-08 19:49 UTC by Boris Dušek
Modified: 2023-07-06 05:35 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


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Description Boris Dušek 2013-08-08 19:49:30 UTC
In Writer, each paragraph forms a standalone AXTextArea. So if one moves cursor between paragraphs, VoiceOver announces "edit text Insertion on word:  can  after character:  a <here comes the whole text of the AXTextArea>". But from the perspective of the VoiceOver user, they just moved "one line", so such huge announcements are unsubstantiated and confusing.

Solution one is to have an AXTextArea for the whole page or even document. That would be a bit non-trivial to implement.

Other solution is to have separate AXTextArea's like now, but they should not be isolated - we should group them using AXSharedTextUIElements. E.g. while Pages has an AXTextArea for each page (or each column on each page), it groups them all using AXSharedTextUIElements and VoiceOver then behaves as if it was one huge AXTextArea and does not announce the strange messages.
Comment 1 Boris Dušek 2013-08-09 19:16:41 UTC
Other thing why this is an issue: now that bug 67680 is fixed, searching for a specific text attribute stops at the boundary of the single AXTextArea, it does not continue search in the next paragraph (even though that's exactly what the user rightfully expects).
Comment 2 QA Administrators 2015-04-01 14:41:01 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 3 tommy27 2016-04-16 07:27:17 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 4 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2016-09-15 12:08:15 UTC
Resetting it to UNCONFIRMED as nobody tested to confirm this.

@alex, @steve: can either of you confirm this?
Comment 5 Alex Thurgood 2016-09-15 13:59:15 UTC
Confirming also on 

ersion: 5.3.0.0.alpha0+
Build ID: c5ba37f58a23fc46b48c0d62d4fd1b3bf7e34f33
Threads CPU : 2; Version de l'OS :Mac OS X 10.11.6; UI Render : par défaut; 
Locale : fr-FR (fr.UTF-8); Calc: group
Comment 6 Alex Thurgood 2016-09-15 14:01:53 UTC
In my master build, apart from each line being considered a new AXTextArea, there are sometimes whole paragraphs that don't even get highlighted, and so not read, and even within a paragraph, sentences that get ignored, while the end sentence gets highlighted as a separate AXTextArea.
Comment 7 Xisco Faulí 2017-09-29 08:50:06 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 8 Boris Dušek 2017-09-29 14:34:33 UTC
Tested
with LibreOffice 5.4.1.2 (Build ID: ea7cb86e6eeb2bf3a5af73a8f7777ac570321527)
on macOS 10.13 (17A365).

The result is that this issue is still reproducible.
Comment 9 QA Administrators 2018-09-30 02:49:10 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 10 QA Administrators 2020-09-30 03:58:50 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 11 QA Administrators 2022-10-01 03:43:04 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 12 Marco Zehe 2022-12-06 10:20:52 UTC
Bug 97794 describes essentially the same problem. This is still reproducible with LO 7.4.3 on MacOS Ventura. However, the bug may be hard to reproduce because of a crash that frequently happens once I start typing into Writer. It appears that something is badly broken with VoiceOver and Writer on a larger scale.