Hey all, reporting an issue from Electron here 👋

We have a bug that has unfortunately regressed NVDA screen reader behaviour, caused by a change on our end. Looking at the accessibility tree in MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) mode within the Inspect.exe tool (available in the Windows SDK) it looks like the extra pane and sibling are shown from the above change - when elements are moused over, the empty pane is incorrectly discovered, which is the primary suspect leading to this behavior.

Unfortunately, reverting this change on Electron's side would cause other issues and isn't an option. Filing a bug here in case this isn't a known issue 🙇

Steps to reproduce:

Download NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/download/) and run
Make sure the mouse tracking is enabled (by default it was for me), even without running through the setup the software would begin working
Move the mouse over the standard Electron app

Actual behavior:

NVDA screen reader fails to read elements in Electron app.

Observe on 30.0.0-beta.8 and later that this doesn't really follow the mouse and just detects the 4 item list group heading
In prior versions (30.0.0-beta.7) and earlier this will properly read each text element the mouse moves over

Expected behavior:

NVDA screen reader can properly read elements in Electron app.

NVDA logs, crash dumps and other attachments:

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

NVDA version:

2024.3.1

Windows version:

Windows 11 22631.3880
x64

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

Electron 30.0.0-beta.8
(works on 30.0.0-beta.7)

Other information about your system:

n/a

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?

n/a

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

n/a