[Interest] Accessibility bug — NVDA reads previous line instead of "blank" on empty lines in multiline text edit — unable to file via bugreports.qt.io

[Alex Blasche]

Hi Aaron,

I cannot find an account for your email on qt-project.atlassian.net. Hence you cannot create an issue. Please contact jira-admin at qt-project.org to resolve this issue.


--

Alex



Confidential
________________________________
From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Aaron Zschauer via Interest <interest at qt-project.org>
Sent: Thursday, 30 July 2026 01:41
To: interest at qt-project.org <interest at qt-project.org>
Subject: [Interest] Accessibility bug — NVDA reads previous line instead of "blank" on empty lines in multiline text edit — unable to file via bugreports.qt.io

Hi,
I'd like to report an accessibility bug, but I haven't been able to file
it directly on bugreports.qt.io (my account has no "Create Issue"
permission on the relevant project) or via the forum (my post was
flagged as spam and deleted). Filing here instead — apologies if this
isn't the ideal list, but I couldn't find a more specific channel.
Component: Widgets — multiline text edit (QPlainTextEdit / QTextEdit)
Assistive tech: NVDA
Issue: When navigating a multiline text edit field with the cursor (e.g.
arrow-key line navigation) and the cursor lands on a blank line, NVDA
announces the content of the line above instead of announcing "blank."
This makes it impossible to reliably tell that a line is empty while
reviewing or editing text.
Steps to reproduce:
1. Open any Qt application with a multiline text edit control
(QPlainTextEdit or QTextEdit)
2. Enter several lines of text with at least one blank line in between
3. Using NVDA, navigate line-by-line (Down/Up arrow) until the cursor
reaches the blank line
Expected result: NVDA announces "blank" (or equivalent) when the cursor
is on an empty line.
Actual result: NVDA re-announces the text of the previous non-empty line
instead.
Additional context: This is not fixable on the NVDA side — NV Access has
indicated the issue originates from how Qt exposes caret/line position
via the accessibility API (likely a missing or incorrect
line-boundary/text-offset report to the platform accessibility layer),
not from NVDA's line-reading logic.
Could someone either file this in the tracker on my behalf, or let me
know how to resolve the permission issue so I can file directly?
Thanks,
Aaron Zschauer

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