Layout View Resorting is breaking Windows Narrators ability to navigate through elements

[PureWeen]

Description

The LayoutHandler sorts all of its children via OrderByZIndex which uses an Array.Sort and a comparer. This causes the elements to all change logical position when they added to the Panel. Narrator is unable to reconstruct the semantic order just by the location of the elements on the screen.

If you remove the OrderByZIndex call then Narrator works without any issues. OrderByZIndex also appears to break TabIndex ordering as well.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Load up controls sample gallery
2. go to the buttons controls page
3. turn on narrator
4. hit the tab key (or swipe forward) to navigate through elements

Possible workarounds

• Fix the OrderByZIndex so all elements with a matching Zindex maintain the same logical order they are added to the layout as. I do wonder if this solution still doesn't quite work because it will still place two elements logically very far apart even though they visually aren't.
• We're going to have to create a custom automation peer for layouts to resolve some other issues, so in theory we could add a custom automation peer that's able to return the elements in the logical order the user added them in.

Version with bug

Release Candidate 1 (current)

Last version that worked well

Unknown/Other

Affected platforms

Windows

Affected platform versions

WinUI

Did you find any workaround?

No response

Relevant log output

No response

[PureWeen]

Fixed by #7270