Hello,

do you have any more info on what you have outlined below? since this is an 
area of interest for myself. Any pointers would be helpful and grateful.

Sean 
> On 22 Jun 2015, at 3:27 am, Yuma Decaux <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> The current OS has python, applescript and jscript that can send information 
> directly to voice over, but I haven’t touched the scripts pertaining to these 
> in a while as there are 3rd party applications that allow to do this very 
> well. Also, there are a bunch of CL tools that also allow some lesser 
> inherent amount of manipulation of the GUIs, provided they are rendered 
> accessible. 
> 
> I’m not sure what happens on the windows side, but I’ve taken it to myself to 
> do everything a coder would do on the mac, and so far it’s getting smoother 
> everytime. And much much faster too. Can’t say more.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> 
>> On 21/06/2015, at 11:21 AM, Sean Murphy <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On either platform, a developer can use their own controls still. They do 
>> not have to use the provided objects in the Coco library or Windows 
>> development tool. This occurs equally on both platforms for the reasons that 
>> have already been raised. The struggle anyone has even if you work within 
>> the vendor is to get them to use the necessary resources to fix it. 
>> 
>> The biggest challenge I find with Voice-Over is if an application is not 
>> using the Coco library controls (objects) that do have accessibility built 
>> into them or the developer is using their own method. Then that product is 
>> not usable on the Mac. If this was the case on Windows, you do have the 
>> ability of addressing it via the screen readers. On the flip side, this is a 
>> disadvantage as well because you are not educating the developer best 
>> practise to use the right accessibility libraries in the first place. There 
>> are applications on Windows which the outlined solution available on windows 
>> screen readers do not work. In saying this, you can go a lot further then 
>> you can on the Mac.
>> 
>> One thing I want to validate and I suspect it can be done but is a lot 
>> harder on the Mac due to you having to know a lot more. Is it possible to 
>> interrogate an application like Pages via Perl, Python, Coco (Swift) and 
>> then send this information directly to Voice-Over. For example: You create a 
>> little app that grabs the current style being used with all the relevant 
>> properties. The info is sent to voice-over and the app can turn the feature 
>> on or off. The reason for asking this is, if it can be done then I can see 
>> how to really improve the experience of a lot of different applications via 
>> this method. Since most developers will not provide this enhance feature. 
>> Window screen reader’s provide this type of enhance capability via their 
>> scripting environments and you do not have to learn an complete development 
>> environment.
>> 
>> How much control via scripts does someone have over Voice-Over using the 
>> above languages?
>> 
>> Sean 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 21 Jun 2015, at 3:28 am, Yuma Decaux <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Let me just add that the wwdc this year has put a highlight on 
>>> accessibility to the developers attending or downloading the workshop 
>>> videos, so saying that apple has put accessibility to the bottom of the 
>>> list is untrue. In addition, now all standard UI controls in xcode are by 
>>> default accessible. This has engendered an effort from oracle with its 
>>> javafx framework to render all their controls accessible for both mac and 
>>> windows.
>>> 
>>> When it comes to custom APIs, I remember there used to be a tool called 
>>> accessibility inspector which allows the developer to check the hierarchy 
>>> of controls and scenes in an application to see which control gives what 
>>> accessible output, or what voice over will announce. Usualy custom controls 
>>> are 3D based or image based, which requires an effort from the developer to 
>>> handle what is said, how and what triggers it, which is a set of coding 
>>> behaviours that need to be placed on top of the custom control.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 21/06/2015, at 1:06 AM, Littlefield, Tyler <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
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>>>> Hello:
>>>> First, it's always a really hard discussion when someone with little
>>>> to no development experience talks about how things "should" be done
>>>> because they're usually way off. So I'll explain how things work
>>>> currently.
>>>> 
>>>> A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away Windows and OSX
>>>> developers all used different APIs than they do now. A majority of
>>>> windows applications were written in C/C++ or delphy, with a couple
>>>> others thrown in. OSX used C mainly (maybe c++) and they used the
>>>> Carbon API.
>>>> 
>>>> Carbon and Win32 basically let people do the same stuff, create
>>>> windows, etc. but where the problems came in was that it gave a lot of
>>>> control to the developer, so the developer could basically write up
>>>> all sorts of cool new things in their controls. Now that people
>>>> started moving more toward using vb.net, c# etc for Windows
>>>> development (because using the win32 API is not fun--I have a media
>>>> player I'm writing mostly in c), as well as people moving toward
>>>> Cocoah, this problem is going away for the most part.
>>>> 
>>>> Now the problems we face are a lot smaller. Windows had MSAA and UIAA
>>>> for providing information to the screen readers, and Cocoah has its'
>>>> own accessibility frameworks. As you're using a framework they
>>>> control, it's really easy to make most things accessible by default.
>>>> But again, the issue is with custom controls. Many times a developer
>>>> wants something new in their app, because it looks cool or because the
>>>> control can provide custom functionality that another one does not.
>>>> This, I believe is the issue you are running into. So rather than
>>>> Apple do what Windows does as they're already doing that, there needs
>>>> to be something that tells developers when their controls are broken.
>>>> This really should be up to the developer to fix, mostly because Apple
>>>> can either say nothing with custom controls gets into the app store
>>>> (bad idea), or they would have to fix it themselves. Maybe some sort
>>>> of testing framework could be created to determine if everything works
>>>> as it should. The goal would be to create an instance of that control
>>>> and determine if it has the requisite properties.
>>>> 
>>>> Sorry for the rambling jumble here, no coffee yet!
>>>> HTH,
>>>> On 6/20/2015 8:58 AM, Devin Prater wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> - -- 
>>>> Take care,
>>>> Ty
>>>> twitter: @sorressean
>>>> web:http://tysdomain.com
>>>> pubkey: http://tysdomain.com/files/pubkey.asc
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