Testing Your Code

While accessibility documentation may be lacking, there is no shortage of testing tools, and many of them are available for free.

Microsoft Testing Tools

Microsoft offers a number of free tools to check MSAA accessibility. The most useful everyday applications are inspect32 and AccExplorer32.

Perhaps the best way to visualize the inner workings of the MSAA stack is using the navigator in AccExplorer. Dragging the compass icon over objects on the screen shows you how items are grouped, and you can find out everything associated with that object, from name and description, to role and state, to keyboard shortcut.

For UIA, the UISpy and Visual UIA Verifier (VIV) tools have similar functionality. See Figure 10-4 (shown earlier) for a VIV screenshot. Figure 10-6 shows “Swarm”—a Flash application that creates a swarm in real time based on current Digg activity. The inset is a screenshot from inspect32 looking at one of the stories.

Screenshot of “Swarm”

Figure 10-6. Screenshot of “Swarm”

Using inspect32 you see the MSAA fields that an assistive technology uses to generate an interface. The primary fields to note are Name, Role, State, Description, DefAction (for “default action,” or what happens when the object is actuated), Parent, and Children.

ACTF

A newer toolset is the Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF). These tools run in the Eclipse development environment on Windows and ...

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