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Accessibility Testing

Historically, screen readers for the Windows platform have intercepted the signals being sent to the video card, and analysed these to form a representation of what is on the screen. More recently, however, Windows has provided limited support for accessibility within the OS, meaning that screen readers can directly query the operating system about the contents of the screen.

However, Starting with Mac OS 10.2, and particularly in 10.4, Apple have introduced full, native accessibility support into the OS. In fact, VoiceOver does not need to guess what is on the screen - it is able to rely entirely on the accessibility information provided by Mac OS X.

However, Apple are only able to make their standard controls accessible. A Cocoa program written using only Cocoa controls is likely to be fairly accessible, as will a Carbon program that uses the Human Interface (HI) Toolbox. As a developer, if you develop custom controls in either Carbon or Cocoa, you will need to add accessibility support yourself. If you're designing DashBoard widgets, you will need to keep (X)HTML accessibility guidelines in mind. Apple provides a wealth of information about developing accessible applications on the accessibility section of their developer site.

But, how do you know if your application/widget is accessible? How can you decide between two alternative solutions? It's very useful to read an API spec, but you won't know if your implementation is successful unless you see it in action, and in the case of accessibility it is very hard to "see" the result.

Here at MacVisionaries we can help with this. We are able to test your application, and produce a detailed report describing what is good and not so good (in terms of accessibility) about the application. As developers ourselves we can also provide pointers to useful information, and describe the effect of implementing accessibility in different ways. Furthermore, we are prepared to do this for free, since we believe that more accessible applications will benefit the community at large, though we do of course accept your donations. To find out more about how we can help, drop us a line today!

This page has been viewed 1 times since 29 April 2005.

Copyright © 2005, MacVisionaries.