Repairing Active Accessibility support

This page describes how to diagnose and repair issues caused by broken Active Accessibility support.

The Active Accessibility support can be broken after:

• Installing certain Windows updates
• Uninstalling/upgrading certain applications such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Office

Observed behavior

Selectors are not generated for applications relying on the IAccessible registry entries, such as File Explorer, Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office.

For example, when using UI Explorer to indicate UI elements in Windows File Explorer, instead of individual elements, the entire area is selected.

Cause

Following a Windows update, IAccessible registry entries were overwritten and became corrupted.

The accessibility support provided through registry configuration can also get broken when some applications (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) register custom implementations for IAccessible, but don’t restore default settings on uninstall/upgrade.

Solution

Repairing the IAccessible Registry Entries

Note: Changing registry entries might affect the functionality of your machine! It is recommended to create a backup first, as explained on this page.

In order to check if IAccessible registry entries became corrupted, you need to open the Windows Registry Editor and verify whether the following keys are missing or have other values, and add/modify them if necessary.

Below are the values that should be present in the registry.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}]
@="IAccessible"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}\ProxyStubClsid32]
@="{00020424-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}\TypeLib]
@="{1EA4DBF0-3C3B-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}"
"Version"="1.1"

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WOW6432Node\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}]
@="IAccessible"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}\ProxyStubClsid32]
@="{00020424-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}\TypeLib]
@="{1EA4DBF0-3C3B-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71}"
"Version"="1.1"

Note: The registry entries from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WOW6432Node\Interface\{618736E0-3C3D-11CF-810C-00AA00389B71} are not needed for 32-bit machines.

The above content can be written in .reg files. After a backup of existing registry entries, you can run the .reg files to automatically repair these entries.