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Add a means by which UIA clients can determine whether a build of Windows Terminal does or doesn't support notifications #13601
Description
Description of the new feature/enhancement
#12358 adds support for UIA notifications, allowing screen readers and other UIA clients to easily determine exactly what new text to report without doing any of the heavy lifting themselves (diffing, etc..). However, as not all terminals support notifications, UIA clients need a way to determine when this support is available and when they should fall back to performing diffing themseles. (if clients diff even when notifications are available, we risk doing extra work and/or double-reporting incoming text).
Proposed technical implementation details (optional)
- In Use UIA notifications for text output #12358 and over email at various times, we discussed using a different class name (TermCtrl2) for situations when notifications are available. NVDA supports this new ID today, but there were concerns from JAWS.
- We also discussed sending an "API version" of sorts through a custom property. This is necessary since wt and conhost versions aren't necessarily tied to particular Windows releases/aren't reliable for feature detection.
Activity
codeofdusk commentedon Jul 26, 2022
Blocking nvaccess/nvda#13781.
CC Carlos Zamora (@carlos-zamora), Leonard de Ruijter (@LeonarddeR).
LeonarddeR commentedon Jul 26, 2022
It could also be considered to add an automationID (it is currently empty)
codeofdusk commentedon Jul 26, 2022
Leonard de Ruijter (@LeonarddeR) That idea was rejected during initial implementation.
carlos-zamora commentedon Jul 27, 2022
Chatted with Bill Dengler (@codeofdusk). This is a feature/task. We'll chat more about it at sync but the short version is this:
zadjii-msft commentedon Aug 15, 2022
discussion: sure let's do it
carlos-zamora commentedon Aug 16, 2022
Bill Dengler (@codeofdusk) here's an idea actually. So, all versions of Windows Terminal in active support going back to v1.12 send notifications. At this point, why not just assume that if NVDA is connected to Windows Terminal, it has support for notifications?
The key part here is "connected to Windows Terminal" because Conhost won't support notifications. So if the class name is
TermControl, you know you're connected to Windows Terminal, and by extension, you know we support notifications.CC Dustin L. Howett (@DHowett)
DHowett commentedon Aug 16, 2022
Until SV2
carlos-zamora commentedon Aug 16, 2022
Nah. Conhost doesn't use the UiaRenderer. So the whole notifications thing doesn't affect Conhost. It operates the same way it always has (I believe it's attached to the
WriteAPI but don't quote me on that one, I'd have to look into it).