Ribbon Screen Reader Support?

[MichaelWDenney]

Does the ribbon interface not support screen readers? With NVDA running, the ribbon, control titles, and control tooltips are not being read. The ribbons in, for example, Word are read.

I also tried the Windows 11 screen reader. I find, in general, it doesn't work as well as NVDA, but it doesn't recognize the ribbon interface either. With focus on a ribbon control, it states, "No item in view."

[kirill-grouchnikov]

This would have to be a community contribution. There might indeed be some parity gaps between Radiance components (command buttons, button strips, the ribbon itself) and core Swing components, and if there are easy wins to close those gaps, I'd be happy to review and merge PRs in the area.

[MichaelWDenney]

Just a clarification/correction: The screen reader is working with labels, dropdown lists, checkboxes, bullets, spinners, and a control I rolled myself and added to a ribbon. Screen reader is not working with task titles, band titles, button titles, tooltips, anchored controls, and the application menu.

[kirill-grouchnikov]

• Task title goes as the command button title of the command toggle button, so the fix would be the same as for button titles.
• Band titles are drawn as text in RadianceRibbonBandUI.paintBandTitle. There's probably something along the lines of JLabel.setText to set accessible name and description there.
• Anchored controls are command buttons, so the same as button titles.
• And speaking of button titles, probably the same - setting accessible name (as title?) and description (as extra text? or rich tooltip?)
• Application menu is all command buttons
• Tooltips - probably the same as the core Swing tooltips, around accesible name / description

[kirill-grouchnikov]

It might be a bit more complicated than that. JButton has an internal AccessibleJButton which extends AccessibleAbstractButton to "mirror" the structure of its content (text, icon, state, action, ...). Same for JLabel and internal AccessibleJLabel.

To set the expectations - this would have to be a community contribution to cover the full set of Radiance components (command buttons, command button strips, command button panels, command menus, circular progress indicators, switches, and the ribbon).

[MichaelWDenney]

Does the focus on #400 mean that, if I work on screen reader support it will not be possible to incorporate it for a few months?

[kirill-grouchnikov]

I don't have capacity or inclination to do multiple branches during development. Everything happens in the main branch (except https://github.com/kirill-grouchnikov/radiance/tree/modularization which showed that Radiance isn't ready to get modularized). The work on #400 is going to touch pretty much everything in the theming module, and then a lot of things in the component module.

Accessibility support is technically not in the same parts of these two modules, as it is not a part of the rendering pipeline. But it would be in the UI delegates, and those are going to be having a lot of changes. To your question, if you want to have accessibility support earlier, it would have to be on your local copy of Radiance (local, or forked on Github), and then rebased on top of whatever shape the codebase is in after #400 is done.