[TOC]
Please note: This document is a work in progress and will be expanded over time to include details about what Orca expects from applications. In the meantime, it contains tips based on frequently-asked questions. We hope you find them useful.
If Orca is not presenting your application in the way you think it should, and the techniques in this document do not apply, please file a bug against Orca so we can determine where the fix belongs. It might be an Orca bug which we can fix for you. Otherwise, we can help you address it in your application and update this document accordingly.
Orca has many commands and modes which make it possible for users to interact with your application. However, the most basic need for applications is presentation of changes in location, such as focus changes and navigation within text. In order for Orca to present such changes, it must be notified via one or more accessible events. Unless you have created a custom widget, you should expect that accessible events will be fired by your application's toolkit.
Examples of accessible events include:
window:activatetells Orca that the user is in a different window. When the active window changes, Orca will announce the new window. Orca also keeps track of the active window in order to filter many accessibility events which get fired by apps other than the one currently being used.object:state-changed:focusedtells Orca that the user has moved to a different widget. Orca presents newly-focused widgets. Orca also keeps track of the focused widget in order to filter out some accessibility events. As an example, theobject:state-changed:checkedevent tells Orca that thecheckedstate of a checkbox-like widget has changed. That change is likely not of interest to the user if that widget is not focused. Therefore Orca will present that change only if the widget emitting it is focused.object:text-caret-movedtells Orca that the user has moved to a different location in a text widget or document. Assuming the event is fired from the active object (focused text field or current document), Orca will present the new character, word, or line in response, using some heuristics to determine what unit of text should be presented.
If you are interested in seeing what accessible events your application is firing, you can use Accerciser's event monitor.
When an accessible event informs Orca that the object of interest, or the user's location therein, has changed, Orca will generally present two things:
- The new ancestors of the object of interest, if any
- The object of interest, or the new location, and any role-specific relevant details
For instance if the user tabs into a group of checkboxes labelled "Permissions" and lands on the unchecked "Allow access to microphone" checkbox, Orca will say:
- "Permissions panel"
- "Allow access to microphone checkbox. Not checked."
If the user then tabs to another widget in the "Permissions" group, Orca will only present that widget and will not repeat "Permissions."
What Orca presents for any given object depends on the role of that object. However, for UI components, Orca will always present the accessible name and, by default, the accessible description. (The latter can be disabled by the user either globally or on a per-app basis, though it is always available on demand via Orca's "Where Am I?" command.)
In most groups of selectable items, selection follows focus. In other words, arrowing to an item causes it to become both focused and selected. In these instances, Orca deliberately does not say "selected" because that is the expected state, and most users dislike "chattiness." However, Orca should announce "not selected" when the user navigates to a selectable item that did not become selected as a result of navigation. This presentation can be seen by using Ctrl+Arrow in Caja to move among items without selecting them.
The way Orca determines that "not selected" should be announced is by finding the "selectable" accessible state present and the "selected" state absent on the item which just claimed focus. If the "selectable" state is absent, Orca will not say "not selected" because doing so makes no sense on an object which is not selectable.
Orca should also announce when the selected state of the focused item subsequently changes. For instance, after using Ctrl+Arrow to move to an item without selecting it, one can use Ctrl+Space to toggle that item's selected state. When it becomes selected, Orca will say "selected". When it becomes unselected, Orca will say "unselected".
What causes Orca to make this announcement is an object:state-changed:selected event being fired
by the item whose state changed. If the event is not fired, Orca will be unaware that the state
changed and remain silent in response. For standard toolkit widgets, using the toolkit's API to
toggle the selection should cause the accessible state to be updated and the accessible event to
be fired. If that is not the case, there may be a toolkit bug. For custom widgets, it is likely that
you will need to make these updates within your application.
There are a couple of instances in which Orca will also include the descendants of a UI component in the presentation of that component:
- Status bars. Because status bars are normally not focusable, Orca provides a "Where Am I?" command to speak the contents of the status bar.
- Focusable list items. GTK
ListItems containing multiple descendants are becoming increasingly common in applications. Some application developers have stated that Orca should automatically present all of the displayed information inside aListItemwhen it becomes focused. This change was made in Orca v47.
Because some application developers use the accessible name as a means to make Orca present the full contents of the list item, Orca has filtering which attempts to eliminate presentation of descendants whose contents are in reflected in the name. Since the release of Orca v47, it was discovered that this filtering is insufficient for some applications. It is being increased in Orca v47.2. However, we recommend that application developers do not expose the full contents of a focusable list item in that item's accessible name, and to file a bug if Orca fails to present the list item correctly.
When a user navigates among rows in a table/grid, sometimes the full row should be presented;
other times just the current cell/item. It can be difficult to programmatically determine which
makes sense for any given application. In addition, user needs and preferences vary. For these
reasons, the amount Orca reads when arrowing up or down in a container with the accessible table
role is a user-configurable option
which can be set on a per-application basis
and customized by the type of table (GUI, spreadsheet, and document).
If your application has static, on-screen text of an explanatory nature and you do not want to make
that text focusable, it is still possible to have Orca present it automatically using the accessible
description property or the described-by relationship.
Examples:
-
If the focused object is a search input, and the text to be presented is "n matches found", set "n matches found" as the accessible description of the search input and update that description each time the count changes. In response, the toolkit should fire an
object:property-change:accessible-descriptionevent which Orca will handle by presenting the new description. -
If there is an on-screen message associated with a group of widgets, set the accessible description of that group to the on-screen message. As stated in the previous section, Orca will present the name and description of new ancestors prior to presenting the focused object.
When using this technique, keep in mind that the description is the last thing presented for any object. Taking the "Permissions" group example from the previous section, that means Orca will say:
- "Permissions panel", followed by the description of that group
- "Allow access to microphone checkbox. Not checked.", followed by the description of the checkbox
If the static text should not be presented last, a different technique might be advisable.
Note: Orca v47.alpha or later is required to have Orca present the accessible description, and any changes to that description, on ancestors of the object of interest. In Orca v46 and earlier, Orca only presents the name of ancestors and description changes on the object of interest.
The details/details-for and error-message/error-for relation types were created for ARIA,
and there was no indication that they might be of interest to developers of native applications.
As a result, support in Orca for these new relation types was implemented only for web apps.
There are plans to support these relation types globally,
hopefully during the v48 release cycle.
Using the accessible description property to get screen readers to automatically announce text in
a newly-shown dialog originated as a web-browser practice, e.g. for alerts. Historically, application
developers simply used toolkit labels, e.g. GtkLabel, to add static text. And those developers,
and Orca users, expected Orca to read that text automatically.
In order to distinguish static text labels from widget labels, Orca checks the accessible relations of the label. If it finds any relation, Orca assumes the label is NOT static text. Otherwise Orca applies some additional heuristics to filter out false positives. But in the end, Orca may conclude incorrectly that the unrelated label is indeed static text which should be read automatically.
While less than ideal, keeping this functionality in place is important, because there are many
applications that do not use the new description approach and likely will not be updated to do so.
Breaking the user experience in all of those apps would be bad. However, it's easy to ensure Orca
doesn't mistakenly treat your labels as static text to be read automatically:
- Orca v47.alpha and later prefers the
descriptionas the source of static text. If your app uses that technique, Orca will not search for unrelated labels to present. - Any label that is not static text should have the accessible
label-forrelationship pointing to the widget it labels. That will prevent all versions of Orca from concluding it is static text that should be automatically presented.
AT-SPI2/ATK v2.46 added an announcement signal which can be used with Orca v45.2 and later.
Simple examples are provided below.
#!/usr/bin/python
import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk
def on_button_clicked(button):
button.get_accessible().emit("announcement", "Hello world. I am an announcement.")
def on_activate(application):
window = Gtk.ApplicationWindow(application=application)
button = Gtk.Button(label="Make an announcement")
button.connect("clicked", on_button_clicked)
window.add(button)
window.show_all()
app = Gtk.Application()
app.connect("activate", on_activate)
app.run(None)If you are running Orca v45.2 or later, launch the sample application above and press the "Make an announcement" button. You should hear Orca say "Hello world. I am an announcement."
Beginning with ATK v2.50, the announcement signal was deprecated in favor of a new
notification signal to provide native applications similar functionality to ARIA's live
regions which allow web applications to specify that a notification is urgent/"assertive."
Here is an example of using the notification signal:
#!/usr/bin/python
import gi
gi.require_version("Atk", "1.0")
gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
from gi.repository import Atk, Gtk
def on_button_clicked(button):
button.get_accessible().emit("notification", "Hello world. I am a notification.", Atk.Live.POLITE)
def on_activate(application):
window = Gtk.ApplicationWindow(application=application)
button = Gtk.Button(label="Make a notification")
button.connect("clicked", on_button_clicked)
window.add(button)
window.show_all()
app = Gtk.Application()
app.connect("activate", on_activate)
app.run(None)#!/usr/bin/python
import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "4.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk
def on_button_clicked(button):
button.announce("Hello world. I am a notification.", Gtk.AccessibleAnnouncementPriority.MEDIUM)
def on_activate(application):
window = Gtk.ApplicationWindow(application=application)
button = Gtk.Button(label="Make a notification")
button.connect("clicked", on_button_clicked)
window.set_child(button)
window.present()
app = Gtk.Application()
app.connect("activate", on_activate)
app.run(None)Note that in older GTK 4 releases there is no way how to do this, as you can't emit raw AT-SPI2 events, or do similar platform-specific things.
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
from PySide6.QtCore import Slot
from PySide6.QtGui import QAccessible, QAccessibleAnnouncementEvent
from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QMainWindow, QPushButton
@Slot()
def on_button_clicked(checked):
announcement_event = QAccessibleAnnouncementEvent(button, "Hello world. I am a notification.")
# prio could be set like this (Polite is the default anyway)
announcement_event.setPoliteness(QAccessible.AnnouncementPoliteness.Polite)
QAccessible.updateAccessibility(announcement_event)
app = QApplication(sys.argv)
main_window = QMainWindow()
button = QPushButton("Make a notification", main_window)
button.resize(200, 50)
button.clicked.connect(on_button_clicked)
main_window.show()
app.exec()In an application without a GUI, you can pretend to be enough of an accessible object to fire this event as well. To hear the result, Orca must be running first, though.
#!/usr/bin/python3
from dasbus.connection import SessionMessageBus, AddressedMessageBus
from dasbus.loop import EventLoop
from dasbus.server.interface import dbus_class, dbus_interface, dbus_signal
from dasbus.typing import Int32, UInt32, Variant, Structure, Dict, List, Tuple, ObjPath, get_variant
import threading
import time
ANNOUNCER_PATH = "/com/example/Announcer"
@dbus_interface("org.a11y.atspi.Application")
class Application:
"""A minimal accessible application to fulfill AT-SPI2's expectations that events come from a
valid accessible application."""
@property
def ToolkitName(self) -> str:
return "Announcer"
@dbus_interface("org.a11y.atspi.Event.Object")
class ObjectEvents:
"""Just a holder for the one needed signal."""
@dbus_signal
def Announcement(self, subtype: str, detail1: int, detail2: int, value: Variant, props: Structure):
pass
@dbus_interface("org.a11y.atspi.Accessible")
class Accessible:
"""A minimal accessible object to fulfill AT-SPI2's expectations that events come from a valid
accessible object."""
def GetState(self) -> list[UInt32]:
return [1<<25, 0] # ATSPI_STATE_SHOWING
@property
def Name(self) -> str:
return "Announcer"
@property
def Parent(self) -> Tuple[str, ObjPath]:
return "", ObjPath("/org/a11y/atspi/null")
def GetRole(self) -> UInt32:
return 75 # ATSPI_ROLE_APPLICATION
def GetAttributes(self) -> Dict[str, str]:
return {}
@dbus_class
class Announcer(Accessible, Application, ObjectEvents):
pass
CacheEntry = Tuple[Tuple[str, ObjPath], Tuple[str, ObjPath], Tuple[str, ObjPath], Int32, Int32, List[str], str, UInt32, str, List[UInt32]]
@dbus_interface("org.a11y.atspi.Cache")
class Cache:
"""A minimal accessible objects cache to fulfill AT-SPI2's expectations that events come from an
accessible application which has a valid accessible objects cache."""
def GetItems(self) -> List[CacheEntry]:
return []
session_bus = SessionMessageBus()
a11y_bus_info_provider = session_bus.get_proxy("org.a11y.Bus", "/org/a11y/bus")
address = a11y_bus_info_provider.GetAddress()
a11y_bus = AddressedMessageBus(address)
announcer = Announcer()
a11y_bus.publish_object(ANNOUNCER_PATH, announcer)
a11y_bus.publish_object("/org/a11y/atspi/cache", Cache())
loop = EventLoop()
threading.Thread(target=loop.run, daemon=True).start()
print("About to announce Hello, world!")
announcer.Announcement("", 1, 0, get_variant(str, "Hello, world!"), [])
# Give the announcement time to be processed
time.sleep(0.5)
print("Done announcing Hello, world!")Please note: Because "assertive" messages can be disruptive if presented at the wrong time, Orca currently treats an "assertive" notification from non-web applications the same as a regular/"polite" notification. Adding support for "assertive" notifications from non-web applications is planned and depends on Orca's live-region support being made global so that users have full control over when and how notifications are presented to them.
AT-SPI2/ATK v2.52 added support for setting and retrieving "help text" on accessible objects. Help text makes it possible to provide context-sensitive information that might not be immediately obvious to the user. For instance in a slide presentation editor, when the user tabs to a placeholder on a slide, an appropriate message might be "You are on a placeholder. Use the arrow keys to reposition it on the slide. Press Return to edit its contents." (As the user moves the placeholder on the slide, the Announcement feature described above could be used to inform the user of the new location.)
Please note: Help text should not be used to announce mnemonics. Mnemonics are expected to be exposed to Orca via the accessible Action interface via the toolkit. Orca has a setting, disabled by default, to present mnemonics to the user.
Help text is supported in Orca v46 and later. Prior to Orca v47.alpha, this feature was disabled by default. Starting with Orca v47.alpha, help text is presented by default when focus changes, but that presentation can be disabled by the user either globally or on per-app basis. However, even when disabled for focus changes, users can always obtain the help text on demand by using Orca's "Where Am I?" command.
#!/usr/bin/python
import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk
def on_activate(application):
window = Gtk.ApplicationWindow(application=application)
box = Gtk.HBox()
window.add(box)
label = Gtk.Label(label="Type something here:")
box.add(label)
entry = Gtk.Entry()
box.add(entry)
# Setting the mnemonic widget will cause the accessible labelled-by relation to be
# set. Orca uses that to say "Type something here:" when the entry gains focus.
label.set_mnemonic_widget(entry)
# This text is presented by Orca as a "tutorial message."
entry.get_accessible().set_help_text("Enter 10 characters.")
window.show_all()
app = Gtk.Application()
app.connect("activate", on_activate)
app.run(None)#!/usr/bin/python
import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "4.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk
def on_activate(application):
window = Gtk.ApplicationWindow(application=application)
box = Gtk.Box.new(Gtk.Orientation.HORIZONTAL, 6)
window.set_child(box)
label = Gtk.Label(label="Type something here:")
box.append(label)
entry = Gtk.Entry()
box.append(entry)
# Setting the mnemonic widget will cause the accessible labelled-by relation to be
# set. Orca uses that to say "Type something here:" when the entry gains focus.
label.set_mnemonic_widget(entry)
# This text is presented by Orca as a "tutorial message."
entry.update_property([Gtk.AccessibleProperty.HELP_TEXT], ["Enter 10 characters."])
window.present()
app = Gtk.Application()
app.connect("activate", on_activate)
app.run(None)#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
from PySide6.QtWidgets import QMainWindow, QLabel, QLineEdit, QHBoxLayout, QApplication, QWidget
app = QApplication(sys.argv)
window = QMainWindow()
central_widget = QWidget()
box = QHBoxLayout(central_widget)
window.setCentralWidget(central_widget)
label = QLabel("Type something here:")
box.addWidget(label)
entry = QLineEdit()
box.addWidget(entry)
# Setting the label's buddy will cause the accessible label-for relation to be
# set. Orca uses that to say "Type something here:" when the entry gains focus.
label.setBuddy(entry)
# This text is presented by Orca as a "tutorial message."
entry.setWhatsThis("Enter 10 characters.")
window.show()
app.exec()This tool listens for object:state-changed:focused events. When an object emits this event,
the tool will print the event along with the accessibility tree from the application down to
the object which just claimed focus. Note that the information dumped is limited to the basics:
role, name/label, description, and help text.
#!/usr/bin/python
import gi
gi.require_version("Atspi", "2.0")
from gi.repository import Atspi
def as_string(obj):
try:
help_text = Atspi.Accessible.get_help_text(obj)
except Exception as error:
help_text = f"({error})"
return (f"{Atspi.Accessible.get_role(obj).value_name} "
f"name:'{get_name(obj)}' "
f"description:'{get_description(obj)}' "
f"help text: '{help_text}'")
def get_name(obj):
name = Atspi.Accessible.get_name(obj)
if name:
return name
relations = Atspi.Accessible.get_relation_set(obj)
for relation in relations:
if relation.get_relation_type() != Atspi.RelationType.LABELLED_BY:
continue
targets = [relation.get_target(i) for i in range(relation.get_n_targets())]
return " ".join([target.name for target in targets])
return ""
def get_description(obj):
description = Atspi.Accessible.get_description(obj)
if description:
return description
relations = Atspi.Accessible.get_relation_set(obj)
for relation in relations:
if relation.get_relation_type() != Atspi.RelationType.DESCRIBED_BY:
continue
targets = [relation.get_target(i) for i in range(relation.get_n_targets())]
return " ".join([target.name for target in targets])
return ""
def on_event(e):
if not e.detail1:
return
print(f"\n{as_string(e.source)} is now focused")
ancestors = []
parent = e.source
while parent:
grandparent = Atspi.Accessible.get_parent(parent)
ancestors.append(as_string(parent))
if Atspi.Accessible.get_role(parent) == Atspi.Role.APPLICATION:
break
parent = grandparent
ancestors.reverse()
indent = 0
for ancestor in ancestors:
print(f"{' ' * indent}--> {ancestor}")
indent += 2
if Atspi.Accessible.get_role(e.source) == Atspi.Role.TERMINAL:
print("Exiting.")
Atspi.event_quit()
listener = Atspi.EventListener.new(on_event)
listener.register("object:state-changed:focused")
print("Return focus to your terminal to exit")
Atspi.event_main()