After the work: impressions on Accessibility (in the context of Access 2007)

After I spent the last couple of weeks talking about the specifics of the accessibility work done in Access, I thought I had to relate my impressions on how the process went.

It was particularly interesting to see how most people have no idea what MSAA entails (implementation-wise) and is about (concept). In my experience, it takes a while for people to understand that there is this tree of objects that needs to be correct and follow a bunch of rules and that simply because the window itself is drawing correctly it doesn't mean anything accessibility-wise. This is particularly painful as owner-drawn or other teams' controls are introduced and there needs to be a follow-up work to make sure it is all sound.

Perhaps what helped the most in our organization was having the Test group deciding that they were going to rely almost solely on accessibility to do their testing automation. (Of course I say almost solely because it takes time to get things up and running, so some improvisation and workaround work is always necessary - at least in the short term).

By having the entire Test team relying on this made it so that all of a sudden there is an army of accessibility testers that consider proper MSAA implementation as a mandatory requirement to do their job (how could they automate otherwise?).