Report formatting toggles (bold, italic, underline, etc.) in OpenOffice Writer

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by gregjozk_ on 2014-07-03 15:29
Some days ago next snapshot of NVDA got ability to report status of font and also has begun to report "bold on", when we pressed ctrl+b to bold some portion of text. is it possible that this functionality can be extended to other applications?

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 1 by jteh on 2014-07-03 21:27
I'm not sure what you mean by reporting status of font. It's been possible to query formatting information by pressing NVDA+f in most applications for quite some time now. Can you please clarify?

Regarding reporting toggles such as pressing control+b for bold, unfortunately, there's no unified way of doing this. It has to be done differently (and therefore addressed separately) for each application.

I'm narrowing the scope of this ticket to just cover OpenOffice Writer, since this is where it will probably most be useful outside of Ms Word. Please file additional tickets for other applications where it is important to you. However, please first be sure that sighted users get some sort of indication when bold, etc. is toggled. (They definitely do in Thunderbird and OpenOffice.) Even then, it might not be possible to support this if we can't find a way to query this from NVDA.
Changes:
Changed title from "extend reporting of font status (bold, underlined etc) from ms office applications to other programs (thunderbird, OpenOffice applications etc)" to "Report formatting toggles (bold, italic, underline, etc.) in OpenOffice Writer"

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 2 by ateu on 2014-11-13 12:22
Hi Jamie,

About the font, I think He referred to announcing when the fontt is changed with shortcuts.

[Adriani90]

cc: @Qchristensen, @michaelDCurran

[josephsl]

Also CC: @codeofdusk

[Qchristensen]

Ok first clarifying the scope of this issue is to have formatting changes (such as bold, italic, etc) announced in LibreOffice & Open Office writer when the appropriate keystroke is pressed (formatting changes are already reported when navigating through existing text). Also confirming that this issue still exists in LibreOffice 6.1.3.2 and NVDA 2018.4.1. This issue also exists in Open Office 4.1.6.

[Adriani90]

@michaelweghorn is there any work on this in LO 24? Or should we open a new issue there?
See #4248 (comment) for clarification on how this issue is about, basically to report when formating is added or removed from text via shortcuts. Not sure if these properties are exposed in LO at all?

[michaelweghorn]

@michaelweghorn is there any work on this in LO 24? Or should we open a new issue there? See #4248 (comment) for clarification on how this issue is about, basically to report when formating is added or removed from text via shortcuts. Not sure if these properties are exposed in LO at all?

@Adriani90 The formatting is reported via text attributes on the IAccessibleText/IAccessibleText2 interface, and since LibreOffice 24.2, the attributes are reported according to the IAccessible2 text attribute spec rather than via custom attribute names and values, see de4e881.

I tried implementing reporting of formatting toggles using that, but ran into the problem of not being able to reliably detect formatting when no text is selected (similar to the newly reported #16412 for MS Word).

A different approach that relies on the toolbar button state (change) works better, I've submitted a corresponding PR:
#16413

That however requires a LibreOffice change so that the state change is actually reported as it should, contained in LibreOffice >= 24.: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/0425b6eb47830b1fe630dc0128d5049f4b3e5582

commit 0425b6eb47830b1fe630dc0128d5049f4b3e5582
Author: Michael Weghorn
Date:   Tue Apr 16 19:02:30 2024 +0200

    tdf#160695 wina11y: Send status change events for toolbar buttons

[michaelweghorn]

@michaelweghorn is there any work on this in LO 24? Or should we open a new issue there? See [#4248 (comment)]
That however requires a LibreOffice change so that the state change is actually reported as it should, contained in LibreOffice >= 24.: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/0425b6eb47830b1fe630dc0128d5049f4b3e5582

This actually requires LibreOffice >= 24.8, i.e. the version that will be released in August.