UI Automation in Microsoft Word: Use move by sentence custom pattern when available instead of the legacy model

[codeofdusk]

Link to issue number:

Closes #13517.

Summary of the issue:

NVDA exclusively uses Word's legacy object model for sentence navigation, even when UIA is enabled.

Description of how this pull request fixes the issue:

Added support for the UIA custom extension to move and expand by sentence in supported scenarios. The legacy implementation remains as a fallback on systems without remote ops support (Windows below 11/Cobalt platform) or older Office versions.

Testing strategy:

Moved by sentence in a large document and verified functionality.

Known issues with pull request:

None known

Code Review Checklist:

• Documentation:
  • Change log entry
  • User Documentation
  • Developer / Technical Documentation
  • Context sensitive help for GUI changes
• Testing:
  • Unit tests
  • System (end to end) tests
  • Manual testing
• UX of all users considered:
  • Speech
  • Braille
  • Low Vision
  • Different web browsers
  • Localization in other languages / culture than English
• API is compatible with existing add-ons.
• Security precautions taken.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This pull request adds support for UI Automation remote operations to enable sentence navigation in Microsoft Word when the legacy object model is unavailable. The implementation uses Word's custom UIA extension patterns (MoveBySentence and ExpandToEnclosingSentence) when available on Windows 11 with remote operations support, falling back to the existing legacy object model approach otherwise.

• Adds a new function msWord_moveTextRangeBySentence in UIAHandler/remote.py to handle sentence navigation via UIA remote operations
• Refactors _caretMoveBySentenceHelper in Word document handling to prefer UIA remote operations, with legacy fallback
• Extracts common pattern retrieval logic into a reusable helper function _msWord_remote_getExtendedTextRangePattern

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

File	Description
user_docs/en/changes.md	Adds changelog entry documenting the new sentence navigation capability in Word with UIA on Windows 11
source/UIAHandler/remote.py	Implements msWord_moveTextRangeBySentence function using Word UIA custom patterns and extracts _msWord_remote_getExtendedTextRangePattern helper function
source/NVDAObjects/UIA/wordDocument.py	Updates _caretMoveBySentenceHelper to attempt UIA remote sentence navigation first before falling back to legacy object model

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (2)

source/NVDAObjects/UIA/wordDocument.py:675

• The exc_info=True parameter is redundant when using log.exception(). The log.exception() method automatically includes exception information, so explicitly passing exc_info=True is unnecessary. Consider removing this parameter.

	TextInfo = WordDocumentTextInfo

	def _get_mathMl(self):
		try:

source/NVDAObjects/UIA/wordDocument.py:653

• Typo in comment: "overide" should be "override".

				pos,

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[CyrilleB79]

@codeofdusk, it may be interesting to test #9002, in case this PR changes something or even fixes it.

[seanbudd]

Thanks @codeofdusk