My primary objection to the Apple accessibility approach is its complete Cocoa, language and runtime oligarchy. You have to use the Objective-C runtime to interact with the accessibility “Protocol” and Apple doesn’t seem very interested in allowing or supporting any kind of access to that runtime except from Objective-C. So, for all practical purposes, unless you are using Cocoa and Objective-C, or are subclassing any of Apple’s views (which was the approach taken by TK and QT until they started experiencing graphical corruption and they stopped, breaking accessibility), you simply don’t get accessibility. We sometimes get lucky and a developer goes out of their way to ensure that their custom views are accessible, which requires work, but again, only in Objective-C, which pretty much guarantees that we won’t get it in otherwise non-Apple projects, such as the cross-platform toolkits. Which is a great shame. I have a note to take this up with Apple at some point; I think they need a C-based API because that is the lingua-franca of interface languages and all these cross-platform toolkits are written in it. Note that this problem does not affect Windows because e.g. COM can be accessed through the ABI in C. I dunno what the situation is on Linux nowadays, but last I looked it was all still GNOME and QT hadn’t yet made their bridge. Is that still true?
Oh yeah, and just say “no" to screen scraping! :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
