Archive for the ‘Accessibility’ Category

AccProbe 1.2 is now available

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

AccProbe 1.2 is now available, and under a BSD license. This is a tool to watch MSAA and IAccessible2 accessibility interfaces. http://a11y.org/accprobe

IAccessible2 released under BSD; AccProbe available via the Linux Foundation

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The Linux Foundation Delivers New Licensing Terms, Testing Tools for Accessibility Interfaces
See http://bit.ly/boubLL

NetBeans 6.7.1 installer hangs at 0%

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

I didn’t find a solution to this via a Google search so for those of you that find this post via Google, here’s the history of the problem and a workaround.

Java Access Bridge

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

My latest project is to investigate a rework of the Java Access Bridge to implement the MSAA/IAccessible2 interfaces.

Open Source Accessibility – A Gap Analysis

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

On Aug 11 I’ll be attending an Open Source Accessibility meeting sponsored by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre.

One of the goals of the meeting is to do a gap analysis of existing technology to identify solutions that need to be addressed by the open source accessibility community.

(more…)

IAccessible2

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

IAccessible2 – What’s next?

Over the last three years I lead a team developing the IAccessible2 interface, defining how screen readers and a11y enabled applications interact with each other.

IAccessible2 is often called IA2. IA2 extends MSAA allowing additional capability such as full access to information about a table or the offset of the caret in a text field. This work was done as an IBM employee under the direction of Rich Schwerdtfeger, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Software Group Accessibility Architect/Strategist. My IA2 work included:

  • Chairing the regularly held meetings
  • Responding to issues on the IA2 list
  • Updating the spec’s commentary to remove ambiguities
  • Providing implementation guidance to AT and application developers
  • Acting as liaison between the AT and application developers

On January 21 I was part of a large resource action at IBM, suspending further IA2 development.

I believe the IA2 work is important. The advanced accessibility provided by IBM Lotus Symphony and Mozilla’s Firefox proves the benefits of IA2. I think the work should continue. But how?

I would like to continue the IA2 work – provided an organization commits to, and funds, the IA2 effort.

I’m asking for your feedback.

Thanks, Pete