[Accessibility] QLabels not read by JAWS screenreader (Qt 5.4/Win 8.1)

[Frederik Gladhorn]

On Monday, February 16, 2015 05:51:30 PM Marcel wrote:
> [Crosspost from the qt-project.org forums, didn’t receive a reply there
> within a week.]
> 
> Hello!
> 
> I’m trying to make our application accessible with a screenreader. A blind
> colleague uses JAWS, therefore I use that for testing. Reading widgets that
> expect user input works quite well so far, but I’m having some trouble
> elsewhere:
> 
> QLabels are not read at all. JAWS has a hotkey that should “read the whole
> window” (JAWS-Key + B), but for our application that just reads the window
> title and nothing else. Everything I can focus directly via tabbing is read
> as well – which is of course not desirable with labels.
> 
> Probably related: We have some QWizards set up. There, the QWizardPage title
> and description texts are used to convey most of the information concerning
> the wizard page’s purpose. Those texts are not read at all as well.
> 
> I have a minimal test case application[0] that has a label (not read), a
> button and a QLineEdit (accessibleName read fine for both). The button
> opens a wizard that has title and description (not read) and no further
> input widgets.
> 
> Do accessible applications usually have all necessary information in input
> widget descriptions (therefore not needing labels) or am I doing something
> wrong?
> 
> This is Qt 5.4 on Windows 8.1 with JAWS 16.

QLabel should provide accessibility information (it is represented by 
QAccessibleDisplay in qtbase/src/widgets/accessible/simplewidgets.h).

It would be interesting to know if it works with NVDA (I suspect that it does, 
looking at Steve's testing. The issue seems to be that we expose the 
information in a way that JAWS either ignores it or doesn't see it at all, so 
it's a bug in Qt.

It would be great if you file a bug report (https://bugreports.qt.io) so we 
keep track of it.

Does anyone know if JAWS makes use of IAccessible2 at all? Maybe that is the 
reason for it not working.

Cheers,
Frederik

> 
> Greetings,
> Marcel
> 
> [0] https://filetrain.de/a11ytest.zip
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