Sara Ford's Weblog

Update on the Tennessee ADA case ... Except below taken from an Associated Press article. Note the 5-4 ruling. Washington (AP) - Disabled people can sue if states ignore a landmark civil rights law that protects their rights, a divided Supreme Court...

I found these videos a couple nights ago. These vidoes are pretty cool, especially considering i haven't seen many of the higher-ranking black belt katas before. Thanks to the Karate Union of Australia for publishing these videos on their website!...

If Gretchen can have her Will Weaton , I can have my MacGyver . As a young and impressionable kid (I was still in the single digits), I watched this guy escape a swinging pendulum trap by using his shoe.  It wasn’t until many, many years later I...

I want to get a sense of how many people use Visual Studio with a mulit-monitor display.  I’ve seen some feedback in my blog comments requesting that we add a feature to drag a code file onto the secondary monitor.  Currently, in order to have...

When i first started blogging, I created a goal to be ranked first on google when you type in “Testing for Accessibility” (no quotes), my article comes up first. As of posting this entry, it comes in at second place. So close, but with another...

Chad is collecting pictures of our customers to post in our hallways. We have lots of posters of applications built with Visual Studio, but very few, if any, pictures of the people behind these apps. If you're interested or interested in seeing who else...

As I demo’ed at CSUN , here are the Accessibility Macros for Visual Studio .NET 2003 . These macros allow users to tweak the Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE by easily increasing and decreasing font size, toggling colors in the editor to pure black on white...

As I've mentioned before, I own feature area testing outside of Accessibility Testing. One of the feature areas i own is Window Management. Here is a listing of some of the new Window Management features you'll see in the Technology Preview release. ...

Have you ever used AccExplorer or Inspect and wondered whether the information presented was correct? Have you ever wanted to know which controls really need Names, Keyboard Shortcuts, Descriptions, and so forth ? It's time to MsaaVerify! MsaaVerify will...

Let me remind you to view my disclaimer if you haven’t already. These are my thoughts as I sit here on a Tuesday evening watching T.V., and I reserve the right to change my mind on how I view things at any time. Most likely, my thoughts will have...

So far, 5 out of the 8 video interviews have been posted on Channel 9 : Accessibility and Visual Studio Are there some misperceptions of working at Microsoft that you’d like to correct? What does it mean to test? How many bugs a day do you find? Who decides...

Today, i watched students in my dojo (training facility) test for different purple and brown belt Kyus (rank or level).  My sensei (karate teacher or head teacher) said that i could retest for second brown or 2nd Kyu, since the kata (form or series...

This was one of the first things i learned about accessibility when i first started at Microsoft.  Aaron, my fellow blogger and partner in crime making Whidbey accessible, blogs more on Accessibility is not a feature .

Raymond Chen has a post with sample code on How to Retrieve Text under the cursor (mouse pointer) using MSAA.  The code sample include how to call AccessibleObjectFromPoint, IAccessible::get_accName, and IAccessible::get_accValue

Check out Saurabh’s post on the “hide underline letters” checkbox issue.  If you’ve ever wondered, “How do I figure out when to paint focus rectangle and when to draw string with mnemonics underlined?” Saurabh has the answer for both managed and...

The shotoblog has challenged me to start blogging about karate. At first I thought a weblog had to be about one topic. But, I’m starting to think that it’s not a faux-pas to blog about non-Whidbey topics. (did I just use a triple negative in one sentence...

I’m not sure whether this counts for being scoblized or not.  Robert Scoble mentions in this post about my upcoming interview with Channel 9, but he didn’t link to my blog.  It feels like I’ve almost been scoblized. <smiles>  Two...

Want to look up more blogs on Visual Studio?  Check out my team’s list of biographies at  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/team/bios/ My bio is located at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/team/bios/ and my career bio listed on the Mathematical...

You can find this control on the Display Properties – Appearance Tab – Effects dialog. It not only hides underlined letters, but also it can hide focus at certain times. If you’ve ever wondered why focus appears sometimes and it doesn’t appear at other...

Gretchen , a friend of mine from Microsoft Recruiting, has co-created a blog called Technical Careers at Microsoft . Definitely check it out if you're interested in what recruiting is like at Microsoft, helpful tips and tricks for interviewing and resumes...

Christopher Keroack, the Test Manager for the Windows Accessibility team, asked me if I could post the following: What do you think about desktop customization? This can either be out of necessity (e.g. making fonts bigger, making UI easier to click...

Let me answer this with a story… it began with a question in my inbox I hadn’t seen before, “Are standard windows scrollbars over-localized on non-ENU OS?” A tester on my team had installed an English version of the product on...

If you said, “A Control's Keyboard Shortcut”, that’s incorrect! I get asked this question from time to time, so I'm going to share the answer here. Let’s review a Keyboard Shortcut versus a Mnemonic. A mnemonic is a...

My “Testing for Accessibility” article, also known internally as a “whitepaper”, is now found under UI Design and Development - Accessibility - Technical Articles at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnacc/html/accessibility_testing...

My first blog entry on Testing for Accessibility has been published on MSDN.  Two 9 out of 9′s so far… http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/accessibility_testing.asp