NVDA doesn't read colomn and row headers in Libreoffice calc tables

[pavel46]

hi all,
simulare to the situation with the tables in LibreOffice Writer NVDA doesn't read colomn and row headers in the LibreOffice calc.
i usually define cells in the first row as a colomn headers and as far as i can see with the rest of my vision capibilites LibreOffice calc is define those cells as colomn headers, because when i go to the view menu and set highliting colomn and row headers the first cell of the current colomn is highlited with the different color.
now my question is:
is it possible to set that NVDA will see this highlited cell and read it automaticly as a colomn header before i start to fill in the necst cells of the same colomn?

Steps to reproduce:

Actual behavior:

Expected behavior:

NVDA logs, crash dumps and other attachments:

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

installed

NVDA version:

2024.3.1

Windows version:

windows 11 23H2

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:

Libreoffice Calc 24/8

Other information about your system:

Other questions

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

yes

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

no

If NVDA add-ons are disabled, is your problem still occurring?

yes

Does the issue still occur after you run the COM Registration Fixing Tool in NVDA's tools menu?

[Adriani90]

cc: @michaelweghorn are these exposed correctly via iAccessible in Calc? Or should we create a bug in the LO bug tracker for that?

[michaelweghorn]

hi all, simulare to the situation with the tables in LibreOffice Writer NVDA doesn't read colomn and row headers in the LibreOffice calc. i usually define cells in the first row as a colomn headers and as far as i can see with the rest of my vision capibilites LibreOffice calc is define those cells as colomn headers, because when i go to the view menu and set highliting colomn and row headers the first cell of the current colomn is highlited with the different color.

Can you please clarify the exact name of the option in the "View" menu you are enabling? It's currently not clear to me yet which of them would result in auto-detection of what is a row or column header.

cc: @michaelweghorn are these exposed correctly via iAccessible in Calc? Or should we create a bug in the LO bug tracker for that?

One of the questions would be how to reliably determine what a row/column header is, as it's in theory possible to have multiple custom "tables" inside of a Calc spreadsheet, or multiple headers,...

Issue #15394 might be related.

S.a. my comment about Writer tables in #15394 (comment) , where a particular paragraph style seems to be used to detect headings.

The NVDA user guide section for Word row and column headers mentions this:

NVDA is able to automatically announce appropriate row and column headers when navigating around tables in Microsoft Word. This requires that the Report Table row / column headers option in NVDA's Document Formatting settings, found in the NVDA Settings dialog, be turned on.

If you use UIA to access Word documents, which is default in recent versions of Word and Windows, the cells of the first row will automatically be considered as column headers; similarly, the cells of the first column will automatically be considered as row headers.

On the contrary, if you do not use UIA to access Word documents, you will have to indicate to NVDA which row or column contains the headers in any given table. After moving to the first cell in the column or row containing the headers, use one of the following commands:

[...]

These settings will be stored in the document as bookmarks compatible with other screen readers such as JAWS. This means that users of other screen readers who open this document at a later date will automatically have the row and column headers already set.

I'm not familiar with these, but it sounds to me like that would be logic (that would be) implemented on the screen reader side rather than in MS Office/LibreOffice. Is that correct?