Hi all. So I’ve been thinking about the accessibility of both the Mac and Windows apps. While Apple has clearly laid out the details of how the accessibility API works, developers usually don’t know them because either its way down in the developer guides or the developers just don’t worry about that kind of stuff. This isn’t just complex apps, these are little apps too, the apps you’d expect to work flawlessly, like Atlantis, the MUD client for mac. I’d love to be able to use it, but nope. Why not, I ask Apple. “Its up to developers to make their apps accessible.” Why? Why should it be the developer’s fault if an app they make can’t be used by the system screen reader? I think that the accessibility engineers have been going about this the wrong way. First of all, if a developer uses a custom development that doesn’t support accessibility, there is no way of fixing that, and we can’t expect developers to rebuild apps just for us. Take the Alter-aeon MUD app for example. Now, maybe an app is pretty accessible but maybe just needs a little more tweaking that the developers just won’t be bothered with? Or maybe an app like open-emu, where the preferences dialog is almost accessible but the tabs along the top of the window cannot be reached via keyboard. We can’t expect developers to get it all right. I think that voiceover should copy what other windows screen readers have done in the past and has made countless apps accessible. Just get information about what’s on the screen and make that available to voiceover as well as the os x API’s.
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