Engineering For Accessibility Part 2
This is the second part of my look at Microsoft’s free e-book Engineering for Accessibility, which looks at accessibility for non-web applications (or you can view the the first half of my look).
Designing Your Implementation
There is then some more technical detail on how specifically to design your implementation, based upon whether the controls you are using are provided by the framework — in which case use the framework’s guidelines to make them accessible — or whether they aren’t, in which case you must develop a native solution for them.
The obvious solution for developers therefore is to use controls provided by the framework wherever possible — not only will you be using controls where the accessibility implementations of them has already been tested, but you’ll be saving yourself quite a bit of development work!
Testing and Delivery
Next we come to how to test whether your non-web application is going to be accessible. For me, this is the really important bit. Again, there are significant similarities to web accessibility testing…
[testing] can be done through a combination of software test tools, manual testing, and user scenario testing with assistive technology (AT) devices [...] Programmatic access and keyboard access are two critical requirements for accessibility. Without them, many different users of AT (such as screen reader and on-screen keyboard users) would be affected and would not be able to use your product at all.Engineering for Accessibility
There are manual tools which can be used to quickly check the UI’s structure and properties, and see what would be exposed to assistive technology. This is where you get to Microsoft’s toolkit which allows you to inspect objects for accessibility. The first thing you want to do is get yourself a copy of the Active Accessibility 2.0 SDK Tools
There are three tools here that you want: Accessible Event Watcher, Accessible Explorer, and Inspect. Inspect works as a little popup window on your screen which gives you all sorts of information about the currently selected control — name, value, description, state, keyboard shortcut and so on. This is ideal as a quick reference alongside any form of windows application to ensure that the correct details are being exposed to assistive technologies.
Microsoft make a point of, er… pointing out that no single tool can verify something is completely accessible, you need to use a combination of tools and testing in order to make sure your applications are accessible. They also suggest you look at UIA Verify which enables you to:
…quickly find and select any UI element anywhere on the desktop. Based on the specific control type and the supported control patterns, UIA Verify provides the built-in test scenarios prioritized for the particular UI element. Developers can add additional test scenarios by adding the code to the UIA Test Library. The tool can output the test results or the summary in various forms.UIA Verify documentation
Of course, the thing to remember for all these sorts of testing tools — and obviously Microsoft don’t fall into this trap — is that while they can highlight potential problems, that does not mean something is definitely a problem, and they are also capable of missing potential problems, so they need to be used as part of an overall testing strategy.
7 Steps to a Better Computing World
Microsoft finish up by raising seven steps for incorporating accessibility into system design. I’m going to amend these slightly to give you all the benefit of my personal opinions instead…
Decide if accessibility is an important aspect to your softwareIt is. Move on.- Use standard controls as much as possible
- Design a logical hierarchy
- Design basic accessibility into your product (keyboard navigation, high contrast testing)
- Implement your design using the Microsoft Accessibility Developer Center and any other relevant resources
- Test
- Deliver your solution and document the accessibility bits
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