[Libreoffice] manipulating cursors/selections in writer with accessibility api's (bug 43390)

[Cedric Bosdonnat]

Hello Vincent,

On Fri, 2011-12-16 at 18:24 -0600, Vincent Povirk wrote:
> I'm working for CodeWeavers on a project that uses accessibility API's
> (specifically at-spi 2) to manipulate text fields. I cannot publicly
> disclose the exact nature of this project before its release, though
> it may be possible to provide access to this project for selected
> developers.

Welcome to the LibreOffice project! It's good to see people hacking
around accessibility.

> I would like to get my patch (or some other fix if mine turns out to
> be wrong) into libreoffice and, if possible, cherry-picked into
> libreoffice 3.5 so that the project I'm working on can function
> properly with Writer in Ubuntu 12.04 without requiring a special
> build.

Your patch looks OK to me and isn't likely to break something else than
accessibility. I pushed it to both master and libreoffice-3-5 branches.

> I believe the fix to be low risk (as accessibility methods
> manipulating the selection/cursor seem to be rarely used, to my
> knowledge they have never worked correctly, and my patch only has an
> effect when those methods are called) and low importance (to most
> people) for the same reasons. However, getting it into 3.5 is very
> important to us.

Then it's done. Feel free to submit more patches around accessibility
like this one.

> I do not currently have a test case. Unfortunately, accerciser is not
> able to call selection methods, apparently because of bugs in the
> python library it uses to interact with at-spi (?!). I hope to have a
> small C program written that can reproduce this soon.

In general, if you have some hints or tools to help us check for
accessibility API correctness, it would be useful.

Thanks again for your help and keep such good patches :D

--
Cedric