Narrator reads collapsed content

Last week, I worked on some accessibility issues. One of them was the windows narrator reading collapsed content. Hidding the content from the narrator was a little harder than I would have expected when starting working on the issues.

The WPF application is using an MVVM pattern where controls are hidden and shown by changing the Visibility property. For users that look at the screen, this works fine. However, when navigating the screen with the windows narrator, the collapsed content was still read to the user. When looking deeper, content in WPF that is collapsed is removed from the visual tree and should not be read by the narrator.

Fortunately, I found some hints to make a workaround. By overriding the OnCreateAutomationPeer method, you can give a hint to the narrator to read or not read the element. The method IsControlElementCore in the AutomationPeer class gives a hint on if a control is a Control element if so the narrator skips the control. This can be used to skip your content when hidden:

public class MyButton : Button
{
    protected override AutomationPeer OnCreateAutomationPeer()
    {
        return new MyAutomationPeer(this);
    }
}

public class MyAutomationPeer : ButtonBaseAutomationPeer
{
     public MyAutomationPeer(Button button): base(button) {}

     protected override bool IsControlElementCore()
     {
          return Owner.Visible != Visiblity.Collapsed;
     }
}  

In the XAML I updated the controls to my own controls and now the collapsed content is hidden from the narrator.

Some links:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50125307/narrator-reads-hidden-elements-in-scan-mode
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/42d6b7b3-6378-4cbb-9209-24bcd0d47e73/narrator-is-reading-wpf-controls-that-are-hidden-or-collapsed-how-to-stop-reading-controls-which?forum=wpf

Image by:Malcolm Lightbody

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