I'm not talking about Visual Studio itself not being accessible; that program
is as accessible as can be, except for the WPF designer, but to be honest, I'd
rather learn XAML for that purpose anyway since it's more precise and fun to
dig in, and I believe all programmers should do the same. What is bothering me
is that programs are allowed to be compiled without all things labeled and
adequate named and described by UIA properties, you know? And it's not just
the blind I'm defending here. This is a problem for sighted individuals too.
I believe that if a program (free or paid, open source or not), will be
released to the public for download and use, then everything needs to be
labeled, and that the interface needs to be easy for users of all levels to
follow. But not labeling buttons and fields makes it insanely difficult for
blind people because if a screen reader (the word is screen reader, not
E-Reader; that's a different term), is trying to discover the information
behind a button or textbox, then all it will be able to report to the user is
something like edit or button when ideally it will say something like, for
instance if the edit field was for a server name say if one was connecting to a
particular server, the screen reader would say servername edit if the button
were labeled properly, and not to mention, sighted people would have a better
time of it too not having to hunt for the right values in the right text boxes.
-Original Message-
From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On
Behalf Of ste...@malikoff.com
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 11:34 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Visual accessibility Re: field/button/control labeling enforcement in
Visual Studio sometime: who agrees with this proposal?
Katherine,
I'm a lurker on this list. Not being visually impaired myself, I hadn't thought
about people such as yourself having such frustration with the tools we use, as
most attention goes to online accessiblity. Perhaps Microsoft and others aren't
aware (or aware enough) that blind people do write code. You mention open
source so from your point of view how does Eclipse stack up in impaired
accessibility compared to Visual Studio?
As for website accessibility, I'm hoping you're better served. When I designed
and built the online public litter and illegal dumping reporting system for the
Queensland Government there was a strong mandate in the requirements to make it
accessible to visually impaired people, at least for all the public-facing
components. Alt tags, no flash, caption tags, careful Javascript use, no frames
and other strict requirements were set.
TO achieve this I found the US government Section 508 Web Accessibility
Standards to be very helpful, as well as the Illinois Center for Information
Technology and Web Accessibility guidelines. To test accessibility I found
browser plug-ins such as the JAWS and WAVE toolbars to be very helpful as these
allowed me to see what the page would look like to an e-reader as well as in
contrasting large fonts for use by a partially sighted person.
If you had a few minutes time I'd be interested in what your e-reader makes of
the accessibility of my litter reporting site
https://report-littering-dumping.ehp.qld.gov.au
(Written in C# / .NET / MVC2 / LINQ to SQL / SQL Server 2008)
Steve Malikoff.
Hello guys,
I was just wondering how many of you agree with this. I, who's desire
it is to become an open source .NET Framework programmer, look at all of the
both open source, and not to mention, Microsoft-provided products, and I
can't tell you how much lazy programming I see out there. I'm not calling
you lazy programmers, so please, please don't take it that way. I'm just
saying, that for the masses, and especially for the many blind and visually
impaired users like me who rely on everything being labeled so that screen
readers, or software that converts text on screen to speech, can understand
and provide the right information. Half of the time, I will download a piece
of software whether open source or otherwise, and I will never be able to
utilize it due to nothing being labeled, or some things being labeled and
others not, giving only half the experience to someone hard of seeing like
me. Now, what I am proposing is strong and provocative, but I think that it
could pote!
ntially be a good thing if implemented correctly. I think that it would be a
good idea for Visual Studio to have a compilation requirement that all elements
are labeled, and all UIA properties exposable by a control are implemented.
Microsoft themselves are lazy when it comes to that; a lot of their new
interface for Windows server 2012 for instance, has so much mislabeled and
missing UIA content that either screen readers don't read at all, or they read
spurious content, as if they are reading .NET classes, instead of
application-generated,
