Steps to reproduce:
1. Create a new Writer document and write "Hello world"
2. Enable record changes and show changes
3. Change "Hello" into "Goodbye cruel" and make "world" bold
4. Use Accerciser to examine the accessible paragraph with the changes
Results:
1. Visually, there is a vertical bar to the left of the changed paragraph. But there seems to be no way for ATs to identify the paragraph has changes.
2. If you hover the mouse over the deleted, inserted, or formatted text, a tooltip provides sighted users information about the nature of the change, who made the change, and the time the change was made. None of this information seems to be exposed to ATs.
3. The accessible text is "HelloGoodbye cruel world" (which, when spoken by a screen reader, is confusing).
Possible remedies:
1. Add an object attribute to the paragraph. The exact name-value pair can be discussed. But perhaps something like "has-changes" with a value of "true" or "false".
2. Because tooltip content is often exposed to ATs as the accessible description of an object, doing so for changed text seems like it would be a reasonable solution. HOWEVER, the tooltip content applies to a span of text; not the entire paragraph. So if we want to expose the tooltip as an accessible description, then each span of changed text would have to have a corresponding accessible object (presumably a child of the containing paragraph).
3. Assuming each span of changed text is exposed as an accessible object, adding an object attribute like "change-type" with values like "insertion" / "deletion" / "formatting" would make it possible for ATs to customize what they present so that the presentation makes sense to the user.
Note: At the moment, the accessible text attributes do not reflect the yellow color of changes or the strike through attribute of deletions. I have mixed feelings about whether or not that is correct. But I also think that exposing those text attributes is not the right way to remedy the problems I listed above (i.e. it's a separate issue).