Accessibility Improvements in Forms

As I mentioned last week, forms in Access 2007 will see some accessibility improvements. At first glance, the MSAA for forms might appear to be the same as it ever was, but we've actually made a lot of improvements here.

Besides making sure all new controls we introduced this time around are accessible (such as attachments and the complex data combo box) and have a complete MSAA implementation, we also did a major cleanup of the interfaces for controls and the form proper. Most of it might seem cosmetic (such as which errors we return for some conditions), but it has the nice effect that we are now consistent across the product.

But perhaps the biggest improvement here is that we now expose all the controls that can be used in a form to MSAA. This includes lines, rectangles, grouping boxes, OCX/OLE information (instead of being opaque) and more. There isn't a single control that isn't exposed in MSAA - and we're very proud of that.

Next week I'll talk about some of the accessibility work we did around tables and other grids in Access 2007.