Visual Studio Accessibility

I'm Aaron Brethorst, the Program Manager responsible for Accessibility and User Interface Consistency throughout Visual Studio. The team I work with is very interested in building up a contact list of our users who use Visual Studio with any and all accessibility...

Sara Ford , an incredibly talented tester on VS Platform, my team, recently moved over to work on testing the Visual Studio Editor . As part of this transition, she has left her role in the Visual Studio Accessibility team. As part of this transition...

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 with...

Consider this my testament as an Accessibility Tester. I am a Software Designer Engineer in Test on the Visual Studio Core Team. My team owns the critical aspects of the integrated shell, and I am responsible for the quality of the shell's Accessibility...

Consider this article your one-stop shop for all things IAccessible. Below is a summary of the most important topics under my accessibility category. Getting Started New to Accessibility? So was I three years ago. Get caught-up by reading my MSDN whitepaper...

I’m calling these keyboard shortcuts “hidden” because they are not bound to any commands, so you won’t be able to find these under Tools – Options – Keyboard. Keyboard Shortcut To Reach the Command Bar Toolbars To reach the standard toolbar that 99% of...

I'm often asked about the relationship among Normal (same as Visible), Unavailable, and Offscreen, and Invisible AA States. Here's my best guess at an explanation. What the docs say Starting with the MSAA SDK Docs on Object State Constants , the following...

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 control’s underlined letter or its...

What s the Accessibility Lab? The Accessibility Technology Group on campus has a lab with numerous licensed-versions of Assistive Technologies (ATs), including Motion Trackers, Screen Readers, Screen Magnifiers, Braille Displays, Speech Recognition, and...

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...

There is a book out on the market for Accessibility called Accessibility For Everybody: Understanding the Section 508 Accessibility Requirements , a 500 page book written by John Paul Mueller and published by APress in 2003. Introduction A few months...

The more I study UI Consistency and improving the user experience, and the more feedback I hear from customers who use accessibility features, I'm really starting to wonder if Usability and Accessibility are really just two sides of the same coin? Yes...

Last week, Aaron , our Accessibility Program Manager, and I did an informal usability study with a Visual Studio .Net 2003 user who has low vision. I shouldn’t say it was a usability study, since a usability study implies asking the user to perform certain...

I’m often asked “What's the correct name for this control?” There are many variations to this question, for example: 1. Does this control need an AA name? 2. Do we change the AA name if a control’s caption or label changes? 3. Do we add the AA description...

I attended a few get-togethers with some Assistive Technology vendors a while back when they were on campus for an Accessibility conference. While eating dinner with one particular AT vendor, I had asked him what we, Visual Studio , could do to improve...

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.asp . I'm working...

Microsoft Accessibility http://www.microsoft.com/enable Accessibility Information for Developers http://msdn.microsoft.com/nhp/default.asp?contentid=28000544 Microsoft Visual Studio Homepage http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio FIX: DataGrid Made Compliant...

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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.

In the past, I’ve focused on testing MSAA Properties. Now we’re ready to take screen reading testing to the next level by adding Events into the algorithm. It is not only essential that a control support the correct MSAA properties, but it is also essential...

From time to time, I get questions of “Which properties do I need to support for my control?” or “What values do I put for these properties.” I wrote the MsaaVerify Testing Tool to do this level of testing for you, but from a dev’s perspective, they need...

Here’s a collective summary of what the different MSAA Properties really mean. Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/msaa/msaaccgd_95kk.asp IAccessible::get_accName Every object must have a name. AccExplorer cannot show “NAMELESS” for this...

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...

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 a Japanese OS. He noticed...

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...