obsproject / obsproject/obs-studio

Twitch Stream Information dock is a web page and is unusable with a screen reader, while YouTube gets a real dialog

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Description

I'm blind and I use OBS on Windows 11 with NVDA. I can't set my stream title or category from inside OBS when I stream to Twitch. The exact same thing works fine when I switch the same OBS install over to YouTube. I dug into it a bit to understand why, and here is what I found.

With a Twitch account linked, the panel for this is a floating window titled "Stream Information". If you look at its child windows:

CefBrowserWindow
 |- Chrome_WidgetWin_0
     |- Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND

So it is an embedded Chromium showing a Twitch web page. Two things make it unreachable for me. First, that floating window has the WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW extended style, which means Windows excludes it from Alt+Tab: I have no way to get to it with the keyboard, and OBS does not offer any hotkey to give focus to a dock. Second, even when I force the window to the foreground and set focus on the Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND child, NVDA still cannot navigate inside it, Tab does not move from field to field.

With a YouTube account linked, on exactly the same OBS version, it is night and day. The Controls dock shows a "Manage Broadcast" button that opens a real Qt dialog. It does not have the WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW style, so it shows up in Alt+Tab, and it contains real controls: a Title edit box, a Description edit box, Privacy and Category combo boxes, radio buttons for the made-for-kids question, several check boxes, and Cancel and Create Broadcast buttons. NVDA reads all of it, Tab works normally, and I am completely independent.

In other words, the accessible code already exists in OBS. It is just reserved for YouTube.

Any one of these would unblock me: a native dialog for Twitch stream info (title, category, tags), along the lines of what already exists for YouTube; or an assignable hotkey to give focus to a dock, which would make tool windows reachable; or simply not setting WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW on floating docks, so that they at least show up in Alt+Tab.

OBS Studio 32.2.1, Windows 11 (build 26200), NVDA, both Twitch and YouTube accounts linked via OAuth.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by comparing the Twitch “Stream Information” floating dock with the existing YouTube “Manage Broadcast” dialog described in the issue. Determine which accessibility approach is selected and verify it with OBS on Windows 11 using NVDA. Done means Twitch stream title, category, and tags are reachable and editable by keyboard, with the window or dock independently focusable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
accessibility, desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
42/100

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