WPF FlowDocumentReader and FlowDocument Screen Reader (NVDA) Acccessibility

Question

I am using a FlowDocumentReader to display FlowDocuments in a .NET 3.5 WPF application (the FlowDocuments have help/info/notes that are displayed based on user choices in the ui).

I assumed that the FlowDocumentReader contents would be read/recognized by a Screen Reader (I am testing with NVDA on Windows 7) - but when the reader gets focus NVDA says "Document" and when mousing over or selecting FlowDocument text nothing other than the first paragraph is ever read.

Are there settings/approaches/code (maybe something like the AutomationProperties) that can be used to get the FlowDocumentReader/FlowDocuments to be ScreenReader friendly? Did I miss something simple?

I did not find any reference to this in the NVDA issue tracker - is it possible this is an NVDA specific issue? Settings in NVDA I might not be aware of? (NVDA version 2009.1)

Answer 1

Have you tried with the latest version of NVDA 2009.1?

Older versions didn't support WPF directly (through the UI Automation API), but instead used the MSAA-to-UIAutomation bridge, hwich didn't support the TextPattern, used by FlowDocument.

Answer 2

I have tried reading a flowdocumentreader with JAWS 11, it was pretty good. Probably because JAWS 11 has excellent support for UI Automation.