Hi Marco,
thanks for sharing your experience.
I remember Patrick Luby doing various improvements for LibreOffice on
macOS in recent years, including accessibility related ones, but there's
certainly more to do, and macOS hasn't been in my focus so far (and
isn't at the moment).
Looking more closely at the macOS accessibility meta bug now,
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164849 ("MacOS a11y,
editing: VoiceOver doesn't read text in many documents correctly due to
inconsistent accessibility tree structure") seems particularly relevant
when it comes to Writer.
While that's not with primary focus on accessibility, it might be
relevant that TDF newly hired a macOS developer:
https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/macos-ui-developer-employed/13370
Michael
On 2025-11-21 09:06, Marco Zehe wrote:
Hi Michael,
Unfortunately, some of these bugs, which we have already talked about in the past,
make editing most documents virtually impossible on the Mac when using VoiceOver.
Most of the APIs used probably haven’t been touched since the initial implementation
15-20 years ago, and Apple has since advanced its APIs on the Mac, and VoiceOver’s
expectations, massively. I know this from the implementation of MacOS accessibility
in Firefox <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Mac2020>, which I took part
of in 2020 and 2021. To make this work properly, someone knowledgeable on the Mac
would really need to get down to business and work on this at least for a few months.
Most basic controls work okay’s, but the actual text area of Writer is a total mess.
And I haven’t even tried to use Calc or Impress.
Sorry for being so blunt, but sadly, that’s the current affair when it comes to
LibreOffice accessibility on the Mac. Unfortunately, due to an ongoing illness,
I cannot provide anything other than my experience from the Firefox days, and
maybe occasional testing of precompiled builds, if someone dedicates their time
to working on this. I am not a coder myself, or at least any more.
Marco
Am 17.11.2025 um 10:14 schrieb Michael Weghorn <[email protected]>:
Hi,
in general, LibreOffice implements accessibility on macOS.
I'm not actively using macOS myself, so others who do that might be able to
give some more insights on how accessible LibreOffice is there for them in
practice.
There is a meta bug for macOS-specific accessibility tickets:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=55571&hide_resolved=1
If you run into any other issues, a bug report would be appreciated.
Michael
On 2025-11-15 15:11, Josh Kennedy wrote:
hi,
How accessible is libreoffice on the mac these days? I am thinking of
getting a mac, and I have important encrypted documents that I use in ODT
format encrypted with the aes-256 encryption. If it is not accessible on
mac, can you please make it so that it is accessible? including writer,
calc, charts in calc and so on? I want to be able to put my ODT files on
the mac and keep working on them and saving them.
thanks
Josh Kennedy
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