Steps to reproduce:

With Wordpad / Log viewer

• Open Wordpad or NVDA log viewer
• Write some text
• Press NVDA+F twice
• In Ease-of-access options, turn on High contrast mode and choose a theme
• In Wordpad or log viewer, * Press NVDA+F twice again.

With MS Word (no UIA)

• Open Word
• Write some text
• Press twice NVDA+F

Actual behavior:

Wordpad / log viewer

"default color on default color" is reported each time, whatever the them is. However, visually, the text and background color changes according to the system colors (high contrast thems).

Word (no UIA)

The text color is reported as "default color".
Note that with UIA, the color is reported as "Black on white" instead.

Expected behavior:

Something more explicit is reported:

Wordpad / log viwer

1. "system text color on system background color"
2. "Black on white" (or whatever corresponding to the visual appearance of the text according to the theme).
3. A combination of 1 and 2 in any order, e.g. "Black (system text color) on white (system background color)"

Word

1. "Automatic" which is a terminology used in Word to indicate that a color will be automatically chosen with a high contrast with the background.
2. "Black"
3. Both information, in any order, e.g. "Automatic (Black)"

Note that background does not seem to be reported in legacy Word. This is probably out of the scope of this ticket.

NVDA logs, crash dumps and other attachments:

N/A

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

Installed

NVDA version:

2022.2

Windows version:

10

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

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.

Other recent versions behave the same way

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?

Yes

Additional notes

• I have not found any other place in NVDA where the color is not specified, i.e. specified as default. If there is indeed an other place, please comment there.
• I had initially opened When requesting formatting information, default colors are now explicitely reported in Wordpad and other edit fields #13942 to fix the Wordpad issue. But I have realized that Word is impacted by the same type of issue and that it would be better to discuss first a solution in a separate issue.
• I have not yet investigated if it is easy to know the real color of Word's automatic color (without using UIA). Maybe it's not so easy and it's not worth it since we are migrating towards UIA.