Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell

Swing is not shipped with any predefined auxiliary look-and-feels. You can imple-

ment your own, of course, although explaining how to do so is beyond the scope

of this book.

Accessibility

The term accessibility refers to the architectural features of Swing that allow Swing

applications to interact with assistive technologies, such as a visual macro recorder

that allows users to automate repetitive point-and-click tasks or a screen reader.

To enable accessibility, every Swing component implements the

Accessible inter-

face, which, like all accessibility-related classes, is part of the

javax.accessibil-

ity

package. This interface defines a single getAccessibleContext() method that

retur ns an

AccessibleContext object for the component. The methods of Acces-

sibleContext export salient information about the component, such as a list of its

accessible children and its name, purpose, and description. An assistive technology

can use the tree of

AccessibleContext objects to gather information about a GUI

and assist the user in interacting with that GUI.

A number of the

AccessibleContext methods retur n objects that implement spe-

cialized interfaces to retur n specific types of accessibility information. For example,

if an accessible component repr esents a numeric value of some sort (say a

JSlider), the getAccessibleValue() method of its AccessibleContext object

retur ns an

AccessibleValue object that provides ...