[vbox-dev] getting object name in VirtualBox gui

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Wait... is it really confirmed that Narrator can't work with (hardened)
VirtualBox either? That would mean our devs must have been testing the
wrong thing for quite a while now. It certainly hasn't reached my
attention so far.

For many reasons we cannot recommend that random people run non-hardened
builds. What might be a way out (not with the current builds, they would
be affected by hardening) is to ship an additional compilation of the VM
UI which is not subject to hardening and can be used solely with the
"separate VM/UI process" option which VirtualBox has already. Would
bring some minor feature losses, but if that would bring back full
accessibility I can see a good justification for spending the necessary
time.

Klaus

On 25.09.2018 19:26, Mihai Hanor wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm not a developer, but I have some experience with VirtualBox. The
> reason why not even Microsoft's narrator is able to work with
> VirtualBox is the hardening of the VirtualBox process, which is
> enforced to protect the VM from eavesdropping (I think). You can look
> at the VirtualBox SDK, but you'll probably not find what you're
> looking for. Also, integrating the NVDA client controller is probably
> not going to happen and it doesn't look useful, because it requires
> VirtualBox to send stuff to NVDA (by looking at the C example), which
> would require considerable effort to rewrite the GUI. The most
> achievable task might be to build VirtualBox OSE for Windows, without
> hardening. A much harder task would be to separate the the
> frontend/GUI part from the VM process and make the frontend run in a
> normal process. In the upcoming major release of VirtualBox, it looks
> like the devs have made a move to separate the VM process, but I'm
> don't know to what end. The frontend still runs in a hardened process.
>
> Regards,
> Mihai Hanor
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 12:30 PM Илья Пащук <ilusha.paschuk at gmail.com
> <mailto:ilusha.paschuk at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     helo.
>
>
>     I'm a nvda (nvaccess.org <http://nvaccess.org>) screenreader addon
>     developer
>
>     I need the way to get some object text in vbox gui, that
>     unaccessable by
>     standard methods.
>
>     are there any api interface to get this info from vbox gui?
>
>
>     i'm using python.
>

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