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I'm sure it will be eventually. Although, how does that even work, hooking into OS accessibility from a GUI rendered custom from-scratch? Is there an API for t

by _bxg1 7y ago

I'm sure it will be eventually. Although, how does that even work, hooking into OS accessibility from a GUI rendered custom from-scratch? Is there an API for that that's divorced from the native OS GUI?

mwcampbell 7y ago
That depends on the platform. Windows is the one I know best. The current native accessibility API for Windows is called UI Automation. It's not tied to any high-level UI framework, though a UIA tree needs to be associated with a window handle (HWND). Mac and iOS have Objective-C accessibility APIs as part of their respective native UI frameworks (AppKit and UIKit). I have cursory knowledge of those APIs from a previous job but never implemented either of them from scratch. Android likewise has a Java-based accessibility API as part of its framework. Yes, this means that non-Java-based toolkits have to do JNI bridging to implement accessibility on Android. sigh I've never done this myself either. The only desktop environment for the free Unixes that has full-featured accessibility support, particularly for blind people, is GNOME, which has a D-Bus-based accessibility API called AT-SPI. GTK implements this API through a module called ATK. Qt also implements it. BTW, the Orca screen reader for GNOME was originally developed by a friend of mine. Probably the best place to find an implementation of all of these APIs is one of the open-source web browser engines. Note though that on Windows, these engines implement a legacy accessibility API called MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) and an unofficial extension of that API called IAccessible2. Chromium has a work-in-progress native UI Automation implementation, largely developed by the Microsoft Edge team. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, on the team that develops UI Automation and the Narrator screen reader.
- lukastyrychtr 7y ago
  Personally, i would not call Gnome as the most accessible as of now. From personal experiences, Mate fares better in this regard. Of course, it has its quirks as well.
  - mwcampbell 7y ago
    Oh right, I totally forgot about MATE. My knowledge of GNOME accessibility is only second-hand.

by _bxg1 7y ago

mwcampbell 7y ago

That depends on the platform. Windows is the one I know best. The current native accessibility API for Windows is called UI Automation. It's not tied to any high-level UI framework, though a UIA tree needs to be associated with a window handle (HWND). Mac and iOS have Objective-C accessibility APIs as part of their respective native UI frameworks (AppKit and UIKit). I have cursory knowledge of those APIs from a previous job but never implemented either of them from scratch. Android likewise has a Java-based accessibility API as part of its framework. Yes, this means that non-Java-based toolkits have to do JNI bridging to implement accessibility on Android. sigh I've never done this myself either. The only desktop environment for the free Unixes that has full-featured accessibility support, particularly for blind people, is GNOME, which has a D-Bus-based accessibility API called AT-SPI. GTK implements this API through a module called ATK. Qt also implements it. BTW, the Orca screen reader for GNOME was originally developed by a friend of mine. Probably the best place to find an implementation of all of these APIs is one of the open-source web browser engines. Note though that on Windows, these engines implement a legacy accessibility API called MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) and an unofficial extension of that API called IAccessible2. Chromium has a work-in-progress native UI Automation implementation, largely developed by the Microsoft Edge team. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, on the team that develops UI Automation and the Narrator screen reader.

lukastyrychtr 7y ago
Personally, i would not call Gnome as the most accessible as of now. From personal experiences, Mate fares better in this regard. Of course, it has its quirks as well.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  Oh right, I totally forgot about MATE. My knowledge of GNOME accessibility is only second-hand.