Bug 84102

Summary: Expose the level of headings to assistive technologies via object attribute
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs>
Component: LibreofficeAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: medium CC: jamie, jaragunde, qubit
Version: 4.3.0.4 release   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard: a11y
i915 platform: i915 features:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 36549    

Description Joanmarie Diggs 2014-09-19 19:47:32 UTC 
LibreOffice paragraphs which are formatted as headings now expose the accessible role of "heading" (thanks!). The level (1, 2, 3, etc.) does not seem to be exposed, however.

Sadly this is one of those poorly-/un-documented expectations (sorry!). But the convention that has emerged, at least for ATK, and which is implemented by Gecko and WebKitGtk is to expose the level via an object attribute. The name string is "level" and the value string is the numeric level. See, for instance [1].

On a related note, this convention might work for the Windows ATs as well. Gecko tends to expose things fairly similarly to both platforms, so my guess is that NVDA is already looking at object attributes for heading levels. But just in case I'm CCing James Teh.

[1] http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/accessibility/atk/WebKitAccessibleWrapperAtk.cpp#L531
Comment 1 James Teh 2014-09-25 01:43:55 UTC 
In OpenOffice in Windows, the heading level is already exposed using the "heading-level" attribute on the heading object. This should probably be "level" to be consistent with other implementations, but that would not be backwards compatible for existing Windows ATs. I see that the IA2 object attributes spec doesn't document the "level" attribute either. <sigh>

I'm not sure about LibreOffice, but i assume the IA2 implementation hasn't been changed too much from OpenOffice, so the situation should be the same.
Comment 2 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2014-12-15 03:50:51 UTC 
(In reply to James Teh from comment #1)
> In OpenOffice [and probably LO] in Windows, 
> [...it's complicated ...]

Okay, this bug will just focus on one OS.

Sounds like a reasonable improvement.
Severity -> Enhancement
Whiteboard: a11y
Status -> NEW

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