electronwindows-10accessibilityjaws-screen-reader

Blue accessibility frame around elements in Slack after using JAWS screen reared


I had a screen reader JAWS installed for some time, then I properly uninstalled it from the All Apps setting in Windows.

After that when Grammarly (text corrector) is launched, there's a blue box around UI elements in Slack. If I close Grammarly, then the blue box disappears. This happens only in Slack.

enter image description here

I contacted Slack support, and they said since Slack is built on electron, it uses the API provided by electron, and the external app was setting 'app.setAccessibilitySupportEnabled(enabled)' attribute in electron API, that's why the blue box appears. Apparently, it was Grammarly, because if I close it, Slack works well without the blue box.

What I tried:

  1. in the Control panel -> Ease of access center unchecked everything
  2. In All Settings -> Narrator unchecked everything
  3. in Chrome, went to chrome://accessibility and unchecked everything, but if I had Grammarly launched it checked all the checkboxes back
  4. as mentioned here, I run a dev console from within Slack and tried to run app.setAccessibilitySupportEnabled(disabled), but it gave me an 'Uncaught Reference Error: app is not defined' error

Any ideas on how I can change app.setAccessibilitySupportEnabled back to disabled?


Solution

  • I got a reply from the Grammarly team, and it helped:

    1. Install JAWS again
    2. Choose "Options" => "Restore to Factory Settings"
    3. Uninstall JAWS

    Initially, I was deleting JAWS from Windows 10 apps list. It had two programs related to JAWS, so I uninstalled both of them.

    This time I also went to Control Panel -> Programs and Features. There I filtered the list by the developer name, and there was one of the programs developed by Freedom Scientific (so it was the third one), so I uninstalled it from there. After the reboot, the issue was gone!

    I don't know what exactly helped ("Restore to Factory Settings" or the deletion of the third program), but I'm happy now!