Development/ia2

This is the entry page on the efforts to enable IAccessibility2 bridge on Windows platform in LibreOffice.

Note that IA2 is only relevant on Windows (it is all based on MS COM and MSAA anyway); on X11/Wayland based platforms there is already a well working ATK bridge and there is something else for macOS too.

Discontinuation of JAB
On master (and for LO 4.3) JAB (Java Access Bridge) has been discontinued in flavor of IA2 bridge: commit. Merged on 2013-12-06.

Configure ia2
As of 2013-12-05 the master branch has IA2 bridge enabled per default.

Obtaining precompiled binaries
TB39

NVDA screen reader

 * NVDA Wiki page
 * NVDA Tutorials
 * Download NVDA 2013.2

AccProbe
The Accessibility Probe (AccProbe) is a standalone, Eclipse Rich-Client Product (RCP) application that provides a view of the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) or IAccessible2 hierarchy of a currently running application or rendered document and of the properties of the accessible objects of that application or document. It can also serve as an event monitor for tracking the events fired by these accessible objects. It is meant to combine the functionality of tools like Microsoft's Inspect32, AccExplore, and AccEvent into one easy-to-use application for accessibility testing and debugging.

See AccProbe for detailed information and installation instructions.

Testing

 * Start LO
 * Enable AT in Option dialog
 * Start NVDA

done.

Note for developers: the IA2 bridge will only activate if a screen reader such as NVDA is running (see  function in  ); some testing tools like AccProbe do not register as a screen reader, so you have to force the IA2 bridge on with a variable:

SAL_FORCE_IACCESSIBLE2=1 ./soffice.exe

Troubleshooting
Put here links to bugzilla entries