internet explorer and UI automation

Hi all,

I have recently updated html5 accessibility.com [1]

As part of that update I looked at accessibility support
implementation in IE10 of the various new HTML5 elements and
attributes.

One of the things that struck me was IE's continuing lack of exposure
(as compared to other browsers such as Firefox on windows and Safari
on Mac) of section , grouping and text level semantic elements via an
accessibility API (UI automation in IE's case). Note this is not just
about new HTML5 structures, for example IE is the only browser, that
while supporting the expression of accessibility information via
accessibility APIs, does not expose the semantics of the h1 to h6
elements via an accessibility API.

I thought that this was due to UI automations inability to express
such structures, but upon further reading of the UI automation it
appears possible (from my naive reading of the documenatation) for
example the semantics could be expressed via the use of properties of
the text control pattern [2] or by creating a new custom control
pattern(s) or by use of the ability to express ARIA
role/state/property information via UI automation [4]


I would be interested to hear from the IE team why such structures are
not exposed via UI automation as I think this would provide a robust
method for assistive tech to access such semantic information about
such HTML elements without having to resort to interrogating the HTML
DOM.

[1] http://www.html5accessibility.com/
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd320536(v=vs.85).aspx
[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd757493(v=vs.85).aspx
[4] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/gg701984(v=vs.85).aspx

-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG

www.paciellogroup.com | www.HTML5accessibility.com |
www.twitter.com/stevefaulkner
HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives -
dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/
Web Accessibility Toolbar - www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2012 05:30:35 UTC