Dialog accessibility in Chromium

In the latest weeks I’ve been identifying and fixing several issues related to accessibility on dialogs (called “bubbles” in the code base), specially but not limited to the Linux platform.

It all started with the “Restore pages” dialog that appears when restarting after a browser crash. ATs, like screen readers, were not being notified about the presence of that dialog due to it using an incorrect role, which made it impossible for a blind user to find it out unless by chance, tabbing through the application.

While I was working on that, I detected more issues related to this and other dialogs, so I started reporting and fixing individually. They also led me to an existing meta-bug related to the “restore pages” dialog and accessibility… In the end, this is what I accomplished:

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LibreOffice hackfest in Madrid

Earlier this month, I attended a LibreOffice hackfest that has been held in Madrid. My goal for this hackfest was to work on the accessibility of the suite, in particular with the problem exposed in bugs 35652 and 91739, which together prevent the “say all” feature in ATs from working properly with LibreOffice.

The root of the problem is that LibreOffice only exposes a subset of the document through the accessibility APIs; in particular, only the visible parts of the document. This makes sense from the performance point of view, specially for huge documents, but poses a challenge for ATs.

To workaround this behavior, LibreOffice provides some means to navigate to off-screen elements through the flows-to relation. The last paragraph in the visible area has a relation of this kind with the next paragraph even if the latter is not on screen. Unfortunately, the associated accesibility tree does not reflect a proper parent-child structure when these relations are used: objects which should be present are absent, because they actually are never added to the tree. Additionally, when the user changes the visible area of the document, the accessible tree is rebuilt to contain only the visible contents of the document and it leaves orphaned objects left and right.

The proposal from my colleage Joanie, maintainer of Orca, is creating a new set of top-level children for the accessible document object to represent the pages in the document. These would be exposed through the accessibility APIs at any time, regardless of the visibility of said pages, and the actual contents would be lazily loaded when required by ATs. This should expose information to ATs properly in a tree structure and keep most of the document unloaded until really needed. Besides, the problems that appear when navigating flows-to relations or changing the visible area should be addressed to keep the accessible tree clean and up-to-date.

Sadly, I could make no significant advances in the implementation of the above solution. First, the notion of accessible pages doesn’t even exist in Writer, it should be implemented completely from scratch. Besides, the “only visible objects exist” logic is deeply rooted in the code and it would need much more work than three days of hackfest. Still, the analysis work has been very valuable to see where the problems are and pave the way to fix them.

Finally, I’ve also been helping a new contributor to land his first patches in LibreOffice. We started with a cleanup of ATK roles, one of the first tasks I touched when working on accessibility in LibreOffice which was still ongoing, and now it’s close to be finished. We also tried to debug a docx import problem regarding the flip property and instead found a regression in image flip for certain types of bitmaps. The work resulted in another patch for the latter problem which is already merged.

This has been a great occassion to hang out with the community, help newcomers and get some hacking done. I’m very thankful to Igalia for having sponsored my trip and stay in Madrid. See you in the next event!

Igalia & LibreOffice

Updated LibreOffice workshop at A Coruña University

I’ve been invited to repeat the workshop about LibreOffice I conducted last year at the University of A Coruña. Contents are largely the same but I’ve done some updates, hence this short entry to share the new slides:

It was a great session, with many interesting questions from the students. Thanks to Juan José Sánchez for the invitation! I hope to be able to repeat next year 🙂

EDIT: 2017 update: LibreOffice: architecture, accessibility and QA (2017)

EDIT: 2018 update: LibreOffice architecture, accessibility and QA (2018)

EDIT: 2019 update: LibreOffice: architecture, accessibility and QA (2019)

EDIT: 2021 update: LibreOffice: architecture, accessibility and QA (2021)

LibreOffice workshop at A Coruña University

Last week I went back to the University of A Coruña, this time to stand at the opposite side of the classroom and conduct a workshop about LibreOffice.

I was invited by Juan José Sánchez Penas as part of the subject System Information Design (Deseño de Sistemas de Información) which belongs to the Master in Computer Science Engineering (Mestrado de Enxeñería Informática). The goal was introducing students to a real world project and see how the techniques they learn are applied in practice.

The table of contents:

  1. An introduction to LibreOffice project: its long history since the 80s, current status and the awesome community that powers it.
  2. A high-level overview of the project architecture to present its main design philosophy.
  3. Accessibility in LibreOffice: how it is designed and current status. You will probably find this chapter familiar.
  4. Quality assurance techniques and tools: what the community does to assure the quality of our releases.

Find below the slides I prepared for the workshop, with versions both in Galician and English. Files are hybrid PDFs to make them easy to modify and reuse; feel free to do it under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

EDIT: you probably want to check an updated version of the talk at: Updated LibreOffice workshop at A Coruña University

Speaking in the next LibreOffice conference

I’m happy to announce that I will be taking part in the 2014 edition of LibreOffice Conference as a speaker. I’ll overview the status of accessibility in our favorite productivity suite, starting with an introduction to accessibility support and how application are supposed to implement it, we will check the particular case of LibreOffice: which accessibility backends are implemented and how the architecture is designed to support multiple backends while maximizing code reuse.

The conference program looks hot too, and this time I’m particularly interested on hearing from the success cases that will be presented there, looking for ideas and lessons to apply to new deployments.

Igalia is one of the sponsors of the conference, taking our compromise with LibreOffice project a step further. The company will also be sponsoring my flight and stay in Bern.

Last but not least, it will be great to meet the community members again, and get to know those I haven’t met yet in previous conferences or hackfests. Looking forward to seeing you at Bern!

Igalia & LibreOffice

EDIT: get the slides here!