Accessibility: toolbar container announces nothing when it first receives focus (screen readers)

Environment

• Windows 10 22H2 (build 19045)
• BCUninstaller 6.2.0, portable x64, UI language fr-FR
• NVDA screen reader — the free screen reader that blind users rely on to hear the interface, since nothing on screen is available to them

What happens

Navigating the main window with the keyboard, the toolbar is reachable, and each toolbar button is correctly labelled — arrowing through them announces every button by name. Translations are in place too.

The problem is the moment the toolbar first receives focus: nothing is announced at all. For a sighted user the toolbar is simply there, visible at a glance. For a blind user, silence means the control that has focus does not exist: there is no way to know that focus has entered a toolbar, and no way to know what it contains until something is announced. The user only discovers where they are after pressing an arrow key, by chance rather than by design.

Since the main window has no menu bar, the toolbar is the primary way to reach the application's commands, so this silent first step is the main entry point to everything.

Likely cause

This is the classic WinForms ToolStrip behaviour: the container itself takes focus before any item is selected. If the ToolStrip exposes no AccessibleName / AccessibleRole, and no item is made current on entry, MSAA/UIA has nothing to report and the screen reader stays silent.

Suggested fix

• Set AccessibleName and AccessibleRole (ToolBar) on the toolbar container, so entering it announces at least "toolbar".
• On focus entry, make the first enabled item the current item and raise the corresponding focus event, so the user immediately hears where they are.

Worth saying: the rest is good

This is a small defect in an otherwise very accessible application, and that is rare enough to be worth stating.

Enumerating the UI Automation tree of the first-run wizard returned 93 named elements out of 144 — the unnamed ones being layout containers. Every button, checkbox and combo box carried a readable, translated name. Standard Windows controls, read instantly, with none of the delay of web-based interfaces.

The "select using checkboxes" option deserves a special mention: it makes multi-selection genuinely usable without a mouse.

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Reported by a blind NVDA user who has just adopted BCUninstaller as a replacement for a commercial cleaner, and who navigates entirely by keyboard.