Bug 67918

Summary: Writer should not have an isolated AXTextArea for each paragraph
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Boris Dušek <me>
Component: UIAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: 4.2.0.0.alpha0+ Master   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Mac OS X (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 55571    

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).

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