In Chrome And Edge v117 The Active Accessibility Support Is Broken For IFRAMEs And PDFs

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Save as and open option of Download pop up in Edge browser could not be identified in UiPath.

Starting with Chrome and Edge v117 we are seeing a new bug that affects Active Accessibility support for web pages that contain IFRAMEs or PDF documents.

This bug means that selectors for those web pages might fail.

Available Workaround:

  1. Start the browser with this flag added to the command line:
  • --force-renderer-accessibility=complete
  1. Since UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities v23.8.0-preview this can be easily done from Project Settings:
  • Project Settings → UI Automation Classic → Browser → Extra arguments for OpenBrowser Chrome/Edge

Notes:

Code Fix:

A code fix for this issue will be included in UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities v23.10.0-preview, which is scheduled to be released next week.

This fix will remove the need to add the --force-renderer-accessibility=complete flag when starting the browser.

It is recommended to keep this flag, to avoid issues such as this in the future.

Why is the --force-renderer-accessibility=complete flag not added by default?

Enabling the support for Active Accessibility in the browser causes a slightly higher memory consumption.

To avoid this overhead the UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities enables support for Active Accessibility only when needed - e.g. when searching for browser UI elements using selectors.

However, add the --force-renderer-accessibility=complete flag force-enables support Active Accessibility, and it will help guard against issues such as this in Chrome/Edge v117 and this in Chrome/Edge v114 5.

Further info regarding this bug: This bug was caused by this Chromium change,

[A11y] Fix for longstanding hypertext errors 7

This issue is reported as a Chromium bug, and it is expected that it will be a while until this bug is fixed in Chromium.

Below is an example of a selector that is affected by this bug.

Reproduction Steps:

  1. Make sure that Chrome v117 is completely closed
  2. Open Chrome and navigate to https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_iframe.asp
  3. Validate the selector from above using UiExplorer
  4. Observe that it fails to match the target element → this is the bug
  5. Refresh the web page
  6. Validate the selector from above using UiExplorer again
  7. Observe that it now matches the target element.

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Updates as of 06-Oct-2023

The code fix for this issue is now available in the following versions of UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities:

These patches also add the option to pass extra command-line arguments to the browser opened using the Open Browser / Use Browser activities.

This can be done by setting the appropriate environment variable:

  • UIPATH_EXTRA_CMD_ARGS_CHROME
  • UIPATH_EXTRA_CMD_ARGS_EDGE
  • UIPATH_EXTRA_CMD_ARGS_FIREFOX

This can be used to force-enable the Active Accessibility support in Chrome and Edge to avoid issues like the broken Chrome/Edge Active Accessibility support from versions 114 and 117.
For Chrome, this can be done by setting environment variable UIPATH_EXTRA_CMD_ARGS_ CHROME with the value --force-renderer-accessibility=complete.
For Edge, this can be done by setting environment variable UIPATH_EXTRA_CMD_ARGS_ EDGE with the value --force-renderer-accessibility=complete.
These environment variables can be set using the Set Environment Variable 2 activity.

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