351293 - MSAA IAccessible.accRole returns string "form" instead of vt==VT_I4 with int role constant

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[martin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060414
Build Identifier: firefox 1.5.0.6

The MSAA IAccessible.accRole documentation...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msaa/msaaccrf_002t.asp

..clearly states that for the retval: "The variant member must be VT_I4, and the IVal member contains and object role constant."

Yet Mozilla seems to return a string variant containing the text "form" for all-form elements.

If you have any questions about this, just ask; I will be following this thread.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Traverse the MSAA tree.
2. Find the node representing the HTML "form"-element.
3. use .get_accRole(self) to get its role field.
4. Profit?

Comment 1

[Aaron Leventhal]

This is on purpose.

MSAA role enumerations aren't sufficient for exposing HTML. Therefore we expose string roles. Microsoft even does this with roles in outlook calendar.

You need to handle BSTR roles.

Comment 2

[martin]

I find that odd because on MSDN says explicitly not to add custom types. For instance on this page:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msaa/msaaccrf_4nub.asp

...it says; "Use only the values from the following list; do not add custom roles or roles that are not predfined".

---

Anyway, adding support for BSTR returnvalues is easy for me. Thanks for a quick reply. You guys have done a great work on the MSAA-implementation.

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I find that odd because on MSDN says explicitly not to add custom types. For
> instance on this page:

Yes, it says that, but we needed a solution. After talking with the screen reader vendors, we found out that Microsoft breaks their own rule. So there you have it.

We break other rules as well, if you want to know exactly how we expose our MSAA, see http://www.mozilla.org/access/windows/at-apis