WPF, Silverlight and XAML
A few links that may help you understand how to ensure your WPF applications are accessible.
1) Ivo Manolov – “Application Accessibility Testing”
A lot of our customers and partners have asked us to provide guidance on how to make their WPF and Silverlight applications accessible, so I decided to publish a post folks can refer to. Note most of the content below is directly applicable to any other Windows application.
2) MSDN content on WPF Accessibility
Accessibility Best Practices UI Automation Fundamentals UI Automation Providers for Managed Code UI Automation Clients for Managed Code UI Automation Control Patterns UI Automation Text Pattern UI Automation Control Types UI Automation Specification and Community Promise
3) Alvin Bruney – “A Pragmatic Approach to WPF Accessibility”, CODE Magazine
In my experience, WPF has made the most progress on the accessibility front by far. However, you cannot rely on a platform and tools alone to cover accessibility mandates. The onus is on you to design for accessibility so that you can deliver a better product to your clients.
Greate resource links, but in a lot of cases it isn't making your app accessible thats the problem it's making your app work with existing accessibility programs that's the issue. On a previous contract I had horrenous problems getting WPF to co-exist with existing (and OLD) screen reader/magnifier programs (eg JAWS,ZoomText etc). I'd already built in all the features those apps had, it was way better through WPF. *BUT* disabled users didn't want to learn new keystrokes for apps they'd been using since the dawn of time, and to make matters worse it was mandated that the WPF app had to work with those users tool (it was a public sector client), so I had no choice. It didn't matter that we could build in the same features, and make it better! it was case of "work with zoom text or else" :( It was just too large a task to emulate exactly what zoomtext/jaws did :(
This was in 2008 (IIRC 3.0/ early 3.5) so things may have changed! Just wanted to highlight that building accessibilty in may not be the only issue!
Cheers,
Rob
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