Remove carriage return and bell character from table header information in IAccessible MS Word (#16874)

SaschaCowley · web-flow · commit 3f82ab672a93 · 2024-07-19T12:08:20.000+10:00
Closes #7212 Summary of the issue: When accessing Microsoft Word via IAccessible, column and row headers set with the set row/column header scripts in NVDA have '\r\a' at the end of them. While this does not seem to be an issue for speech (presumably synths just ignore control characters), these characters were being output in braille. Description of user facing changes Extraneous output is no longer produced. Description of development approach Modified NVDAObjects.IAccessible.winword.WordDocument.fetchAssociatedHeaderCellText to drop '\r\a' if it was a suffix to any of the row or column headers' text.
diff --git a/source/NVDAObjects/IAccessible/winword.py b/source/NVDAObjects/IAccessible/winword.py
@@ -219,7 +219,8 @@ def fetchAssociatedHeaderCellText(self, cell, columnHeader=False):
 							tempColumnNumber -= 1
 							continue
 						break
-					textList.append(headerCell.range.text)
+					# 7212: Filter the carriage return and bell character from header text.
+					textList.append(headerCell.range.text.removesuffix("\r\a"))
 			else:
 				for headerColumnNumber in range(info.columnNumber, info.columnNumber + info.colSpan):
 					tempRowNumber = rowNumber
@@ -230,7 +231,8 @@ def fetchAssociatedHeaderCellText(self, cell, columnHeader=False):
 							tempRowNumber -= 1
 							continue
 						break
-					textList.append(headerCell.range.text)
+					# 7212: Filter the carriage return and bell character from header text.
+					textList.append(headerCell.range.text.removesuffix("\r\a"))
 			text = " ".join(textList)
 			if text:
 				return text
diff --git a/user_docs/en/changes.md b/user_docs/en/changes.md
@@ -17,6 +17,7 @@
   * UIA for XAML and WPF text controls. (#16817, @LeonarddeR)
   * IAccessible2 for browsers such as Firefox and Chromium based browsers. (#11545, #16815, @LeonarddeR)
   * UIA in Windows Terminal. (#16873, @codeofdusk)
+* When accessing Microsoft Word without UI Automation, NVDA no longer outputs garbage characters in braille in table headers defined with the set row and column header commands. (#7212)
 * The Seika Notetaker driver now correctly generates braille input for space, backspace and dots with space/backspace gestures. (#16642, @school510587)
 * In on-demand speech mode, NVDA does not talk anymore when a message is opened in Outlook, when a new page is loaded in a browser or during the slideshow in PowerPoint. (#16825, @CyrilleB79)
 
