Fabric: activating the window doesn't announce the window or the focused control to a screen reader

[alexoloopios]

Problem Description

When a Fabric app is activated, NVDA reads only the window title. It doesn't say "window" after the title, and it doesn't announce the control that has focus. On Paper both of those happened.

I hit this building my own app and assumed I'd wired something up wrong. Then I realised both versions of React Native Gallery are on the Store, so it's easy to compare Paper and Fabric side by side without building anything.

Speech captured from NVDA's Speech Viewer while switching into each app:

React Native Gallery (Legacy), Paper/UWP:

React Native Gallery (Legacy)
React Native Gallery (Legacy)  window
Navigation bar  button

React Native Gallery, current Fabric build:

React Native Gallery

My app on RNW 0.84.0:

GitApp

The missing "window" is cosmetic. The missing focused control isn't. Someone alt-tabbing into the app gets no idea where they are until they press Tab or an arrow key, and if they land somewhere they didn't expect there's nothing telling them so.

The cause looks like the window itself rather than anything in the tree. On Paper the app was UWP, so the top-level window was an ApplicationFrameWindow owned by ApplicationFrameHost, which NVDA has specific handling for. On Fabric it's a Microsoft.UI.Windowing.Window in the app's own process. Everything else I compared is the same across all three:

	Legacy Gallery	Gallery	My app
Win32 class	ApplicationFrameWindow	Microsoft.UI.Windowing.Window	Microsoft.UI.Windowing.Window
Host process	ApplicationFrameHost	app	app
GWL_STYLE		0x15CF0000	0x15CF0000
GWL_EXSTYLE		0x00000100	0x00000100
UIA ControlType	Window	Window	Window
LocalizedControlType	window	window	window
FrameworkId	Win32	Win32	Win32

So the UIA properties on the window are already what you'd want. It's the activation event that isn't producing the usual announcement.

Worth saying that everything inside the app is fine. Tabbing to a button in my app gives:

Fetch  button  Downloads new commits without changing your working tree  F

which is accessibilityLabel, accessibilityHint and accessibilityAccessKey all coming through correctly. Arrow key navigation in lists reads correctly too. It's specifically the moment the window is activated.

I don't know whether this is fixable in RNW or whether it needs something from the windowing layer underneath. If there's a workaround at the app level I'd be glad to hear it. Re-asserting focus on WM_ACTIVATE to force a UIA focus change is the only thing I can think of, and that needs a native activation event surfaced to JS, since AppState only reports deactivation and only behind MapWindowDeactivatedToAppStateInactive.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Install both React Native Gallery and React Native Gallery (Legacy) from the Microsoft Store.
2. Start NVDA and turn on Speech Viewer (NVDA menu, Tools, Speech Viewer).
3. Alt-tab into the legacy app. Speech Viewer shows the title, then <title> window, then the focused control.
4. Alt-tab into the current app. Speech Viewer shows the title and nothing else.

Same result with a new app from npx react-native init-windows --template cpp-app.

Expected Results

Activating a Fabric window announces the window and the focused control, the way Paper did and the way other Windows apps do.

CLI version

20.1.0

Environment

System:
  OS: Windows 11 10.0.26300 (26H2, UBR 9445)
  CPU: (16) x64 AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
  Memory: 15.70 GB / 31.29 GB
Binaries:
  Node: 25.9.0
  Yarn: 1.22.22
  npm: 11.19.1
SDKs:
  Windows SDK: 10.0.26100.0
IDEs:
  Visual Studio 2026 (18.9.3)
npmPackages:
  "@react-native-community/cli": 20.1.0
  react: 19.2.3
  react-native: 0.84.1
  react-native-windows: 0.84.0

NVDA 2026.2.

Community Modules

None. Reproduces on a bare cpp-app template project and on both Store builds of React Native Gallery.

Target Platform Version

Windows 11 10.0.26300

Target Device(s)

Desktop

Visual Studio Version

Visual Studio 2026

Build Configuration

Debug

Snack, code example, screenshot, or link to a repository

Reproduces on React Native Gallery from the Store, no repo needed.