[vbox-dev] getting object name in VirtualBox gui

[Mihai Hanor]

Hi Klaus,

When you say that the devs have been working on it, are you referring to
the 5.2.18 release build, the testing builds or the svn? I've build today a
svn on Windows 10 and the Windows Narrator is not able to read the VM
window menu controls. All I hear for it is "pain"/"main" or something
similar, I'm not sure what it's saying. It's only able to read the VM
window title. The same thing happens with 5.2.18.
>From my perspective (building VirtualBox and crashing things), the fact
that the OS or the debugger are unable to get a "handle" on the hardened
process, it's something missing. WER just lets the process exit, because it
can't attach to it. Windbg also can't attach to the process. I'm only able
to save a dump when there's no default debugger, when the OS puts a message
box that the process has crashed, then I start Process Explorer as admin
and dump the process. I haven't found a way to do automatic process memory
saving. That's the experience I remember, because I haven't had a crash in
some time. A build-in crash handler could help users report crashes, it
could be useful.

Regards,
Mihai

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 8:52 PM Klaus Espenlaub <klaus.espenlaub at oracle.com>
wrote:

> 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>
> wrote:
>
>> helo.
>>
>>
>> I'm a nvda (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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