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LeonarddeR opened this issue Apr 7, 2016 · 6 comments · Fixed by #14610
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Report background and highlighting colors in Microsoft Word #5866

LeonarddeR opened this issue Apr 7, 2016 · 6 comments · Fixed by #14610
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app/microsoft-office enhancement needs-technical-investigation A technical investigation is required to progress the issue. p4 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority triaged Has been triaged, issue is waiting for implementation.
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2023.2

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@LeonarddeR
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I noticed that NVDA is unable to report background and highlighting color changes in Microsoft Word. Check the attachment for an example.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Type a two lines of text in an empty document
  2. Select the second line of text
  3. Press alt+h,i and select a highlighting color
  4. Select again, press alt+h,h and select a differenc background color
  5. Arrow up and down in the document with color reporting enabled

Actual result: NVDA reports no difference
Proposed result: NVDA reports both background and highlighting color changes
@LeonarddeR
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Given the recent work that has been done to improve MS Word support (#2961, #5800, #5946), I'd like to bring this ticket under attention again.

@feerrenrut, mind assigning a priority to this?

@feerrenrut feerrenrut added enhancement app/microsoft-office p4 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority labels Mar 13, 2017
@nishimotz nishimotz mentioned this issue Apr 29, 2018
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@nishimotz
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Requested the enhancement in Japan, regarding Microsoft Outlook as well.

@Adriani90
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This would be really helpful. I hope it will come any time in the future into NVDA.

@ABuffEr ABuffEr mentioned this issue Jan 12, 2023
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@ABuffEr
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ABuffEr commented Jan 15, 2023

Hi @LeonarddeR ,

I heavily played with UIA and VBA in recent days, around this situation.

Imho, it's very confused even API side.

Had you find a reliable way to distinguish between background and highlight color?

I found only this property useful to be sure whether there is an highlighting and what's the color applied...

@seanbudd seanbudd added the triaged Has been triaged, issue is waiting for implementation. label Jan 16, 2023
@LeonarddeR
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I haven't played with this for years, so I have no idea honestly.

@seanbudd seanbudd added the needs-technical-investigation A technical investigation is required to progress the issue. label Jan 16, 2023
@ABuffEr
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ABuffEr commented Jan 16, 2023

Meanwhile I encountered problems with attached document, so i suspect the situation is changed from 2016, even in current Word support of these formatting in documents made with previous versions.

However, Range.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor seems a good candidate to query for background.

I'll continue to investigate, these seem to be things quite important in school, for teachers and students.

@ABuffEr ABuffEr mentioned this issue Feb 3, 2023
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seanbudd pushed a commit that referenced this issue Apr 4, 2023
@ABuffEr
Report background and highlighted text in MS Word (#14610)
d9c0393 
Fixes #5866, fixes #7396, fixes #12101

Summary of the issue:
In these years, Microsoft Word users working without UIA had no feedback about background and highlighting colors, often used by colleagues, teachers and students.

UIA has provided a partial solution when available, but its support for these features is far from perfect (see later).

Description of user facing changes
Assuming UIA is not available/forcibly enabled:

when color reporting is enabled in formatting preferences, users will hear background colors too;
when marked/highlighted text reporting is enabled in formatting preferences, users will hear highlighting colors ("highlighted in {color}" and "no highlighting"), regardless of color reporting.
Description of development approach
It was very difficult to find a way, so I'll add some details.

Initially, I used VBA objects approach, querying Paragraph.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor and Range.HighlightColorIndex over a winwordDocument.Range to calculate each time, so it was very slow.

Then I found this document and, after having understood what I needed and how to find the required wdDISPID_ constants, I was able to move all work on the C++ component of nvdaHelperRemote related to winword, that appears very much faster.

In window/winword.py, to take advantage of winwordColorToNVDAColor work, I added also a dict that collects indexes from wdColorIndex and decimal values from wdColor.

About speech, I had to introduce a new format field, highlight-color.

Now, UIA: sure, it already covers background and highlight colors, but expose them as the same attribute, via UIA_BackgroundColorAttributeId (and no, I asked, even visually they are distinct). There is an AnnotationType_Highlighted identifier, but it seems to not be used in this scenario.

Locally I have a possible workaround, based on the fact that, as you see in Word Home menu, highlighting color is applied to characters, background color to paragraphs; so, if textRange has a background-color, I compare it to that retrieved from paragraph and, if I receive IUnknown/MixedAttributeValue, I assume the initial one is an highlighting color and try to get the real background color from "\r" EOL.

But I'm not totally convinced, so I not included it in this PR for now.
@nvaccessAuto nvaccessAuto added this to the 2023.2 milestone Apr 4, 2023
This was referenced Jun 29, 2023
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app/microsoft-office enhancement needs-technical-investigation A technical investigation is required to progress the issue. p4 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority triaged Has been triaged, issue is waiting for implementation.
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Report background and highlighted text in MS Word ABuffEr/nvda
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@nishimotz @LeonarddeR @feerrenrut @ABuffEr @seanbudd @nvaccessAuto @Adriani90