| Ticket UUID: | e770378a5ba56ca2afa626b5e7247c54b42e1362 | |||
| Title: | Narrator fails to speak accessible text on Windows | |||
| Type: | Bug | Version: | 9.1 | |
| Submitter: | kevin_walzer | Created on: | 2025-11-19 17:34:40 | |
| Subsystem: | 68. Win Window Operations | Assigned To: | kevin_walzer | |
| Priority: | 9 Immediate | Severity: | Severe | |
| Status: | Closed | Last Modified: | 2025-11-24 15:21:26 | |
| Resolution: | Fixed | Closed By: | jan.nijtmans | |
| Closed on: | 2025-11-24 15:21:26 | |||
| Description: |
apn provided feedback on accessibility using the Narrator screen reader bundled with Windows. Feedback includes the following: —— On focus, text, label, entry and spinboxes narrate their content. However, text and entry widgets do not narrate words as they are typed, only letters. Notepad in contrast narrates words as well. Only the toplevel entries in a menu bar are narrated, the drop down entries are not even if they are tabbed to get focus. Buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes and treeview nodes do not narrate content. Radio buttons only say selected/not selected. Buttons only says “Button” irrespective of text on button. I don’t know if one has to explicitly use the tk accessible command to set values to narrate for these widgets. —— | |||
| User Comments: |
jan.nijtmans added on 2025-11-24 15:21:26:
Full [f7af700ca1e9dcb0|fix] committed now. jan.nijtmans added on 2025-11-23 21:39:08: It only fails in debug mode, that's why it's good we have GITHUB to catch it. kevin_walzer added on 2025-11-23 21:22:55: Wow, I didn't expect this! The test suite on Windows showed no failures for me. Thank you for catching and committing the potential fix. jan.nijtmans added on 2025-11-23 21:11:35: It looks like commit [7ae188dab9] broke the Windows build: https://github.com/tcltk/tk/actions/runs/19529710474 From visual code inspection, I think I see the problem. [d24e098779|this] hopefully fixes it. kevin_walzer added on 2025-11-19 23:42:42: Commit 7ae188dab9 addresses these issues. I've removed the stub UIA implementation altogether and now delegate UIA support to the MSAA-UIA bridge provided by Windows. Additionally, fixes to accessible name functions ensure Narrator now speaks menu, button and other labels. Some aspects of Narrator remain unsupported, such as text selection events and live narration of text changes; the differences between how MSAA handles these and UIA are too great for the bridge to handle. But Narrator is now improved in providing basic support for Tk accessibility. | |||