Prior to my retirement from accessibility (i’m still retired, btw), i wrote a testing tool for verifying the required MSAA properties needed for Assistive Technology devices, like screen readers, Braille displays, and so forth.  Working on the power toys for the past year has made me want to pick up the little guy again and try to finish all of the ideas i had started.  I’m a huge believer in leading by example, so i’ve been itching to start my own pet project on codeplex .  And of course, this little tool is a natural first choice. 

MsaaVerify Pet Project on CodePlex

Another motivation for reintroducing this tool stems from my overall community work.  I want to better understand community engagement.  It’s a part of a larger plan to understand the term community and everything that goes along with it.

Ways to Participate

Besides the obvious software development aspects of contributing code or bug reports, i could use some help with

  • What is the best way to represent pass / failure in the UI
  • How should I describe what changes need to be made to fix a failure

The more i work on this tool, the more i think that maybe a better home is in FXCop, but i want to get the proof of concept working first, then maybe port to FXCop.  Thoughts?

Current Release – MsaaVerify 1.1 Alpha

  • A rearchitectured baseline prototype with lots and lots of code clean-up
  • Verifies only push buttons and edit boxes
  • Verifies only one object at a time (and with the current design, if a child object is captures, e.g. a listview item, the parent object is the one that’s verified)
  • Updates to the UI from the version on GotDotNet

Future Releases – MsaaVerify 1.1 Beta

Once i have these things implemented, i’ll release a Beta version

  • Verification support for many more standard controls
  • Hopefully, updated UI for the verification results
  • Support for capturing a control based on tab order (needed to verify things like a text box’s name comes from the control that immediately precedes it in tab order)

And Further Out Future Releases

I’ve written a lightweight vision doc on the direction of the tool, some functionality i’d like to add to it, etc.