RE: Support for UI Automation

Henny,

I asked the folks responsible for UI Automation about this.  Here is their reply.  Individual vendors should be contacted for more specifics on their support for UI Automation.   If you want more details on UI Automation let me know and I can get you in touch with the right contacts.

NV Access, Freedom Scientific, AI Squared, Dolphin, TextHelp all will be supporting UI Automation in their next major release, or do so today. TextHelp already supports UI Automation via the managed APIs. The rest will be using the new unmanaged client APIs that are being made available with the release of Windows 7. The unmanaged APIs will most likely go downlevel, but we don't have a plan with dates yet available for downlevel. For those organizations that want to take advantage of the new features in the unmanaged APIs but use managed code, they can use COM interop to get at the new functionality.

NV Access has a grant from Microsoft to implement UIA, and you can find their blog at: http://www.nvaccess.org/blog/MicrosoftGrant2008-2009Announcement

Novell is implementing UI Automation for Linux for the Suse, Ubuntu and RedHat distros under the Mono environment. They are just finishing up on their provider side implementation in March of this year, and then will start to work on the client side implementations. Their support includes accessibility for Winforms and Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight). Details about their project can be found at: http://www.mono-project.com/Accessibility. The Novell implementation bridges to the Linux ATK.

UI Automation was donated to with a Microsoft Community Promise the details of the specification are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A1FE1066-BF4F-44FC-834B-676B311E83A2&displaylang=en&tm. One of the documents that is part of the collection of specifications, is the mapping of UIA to W3C ARIA specification.

Kelly


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ua-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ua-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Henny Swan
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 8:27 AM
To: David Poehlman
Cc: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
Subject: Re: Support for UI Automation

Thanks David.

On 26 Feb 2009, at 11:09, David Poehlman wrote:

> on windows, you are better off to stick with msaa and hacks but this
> has more to do with software than with the web.
>
> On Feb 26, 2009, at 5:04 AM, Henny Swan wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Another quick question for the list if I may.
>
> Does anyone know how well UI Automation is supported by screen
> readers such as Jaws, WindowEyes and others such as NVDA? As I
> understand it Iaccessible2 is sort of cross platform but not fully
> (this I am still a bit unclear on I admit) so I am curious to know
> if UIA would be a better route to go down with regards to a robust
> cross platform accessibility API.
>
> Thanks in advance, Henny
>
> --
> Henny Swan
> Web Evangelist
> Member of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Education and Outreach
> Group
> www.opera.com/developer
>
> Personal blog: www.iheni.com
>
> Stay up to date with the Web Standards Curriculum www.opera.com/wsc
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Jonnie Appleseed
> with his
> Hands-On Technolog(eye)s
> reducing technology's disabilities
> one byte at a time
>




--
Henny Swan
Web Evangelist
Member of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Education and Outreach Group
www.opera.com/developer

Personal blog: www.iheni.com

Stay up to date with the Web Standards Curriculum www.opera.com/wsc

Received on Thursday, 26 February 2009 18:34:06 UTC