Microsoft Technologies for Java: Active Accessibility for Java

Active Accessibility for Java

Overview

What Is Microsoft Active Accessibility for Java?

Who Should Use Active Accessibility for Java?

Active Accessibility for Java Interface and Classes

The Microsoft Application Foundation Classes

The Microsoft® Active Accessibility™ for Java is a suite of standard Java interfaces. They allow Java developers to easily make their applications usable by the millions of computer users with disabilities. Active Accessibility for Java can be used on any computing platform that supports Java, and on an accessibility programming model, like Microsoft's Active Accessibility.

What Is Microsoft Active Accessibility for Java?

Accessibility for people with disabilities (or, simply, "accessibility") refers to software features and tools that enable these users to efficiently use computer applications. Typically, specialized helper applications (called "accessibility aids") and, to a lesser degree, operating systems, have provided these capabilities.

Active Accessibility is the "umbrella" name for the Microsoft architecture and interface standards that support the integration of accessibility tools with accessibility-aware applications. It provides the fundamental accessibility infrastructure and defining integration standards that bring the most value—with the least impact—on supporting applications.

Active Accessibility is targeted at mainstream software developers, accessibility aid vendors, and now—through Active Accessibility for Java—at the the cross-platform Java development community too. For more information on Active Accessibility, go to http://microsoft.com/enable/.

Accessibility aids perform the following main tasks, among others:

Screen reading. These tools provide audio or Braille interpretations, or both, of text and other visual elements on the screen. They are for people who are blind or visually impaired.

Screen magnification. These applications allow people with low vision to adequately see on-screen information.

Input enhancement. These hardware and software tools support users with limited dexterity or no ability to use a traditional input device. Input enhancement aids enable these individuals to use different keyboard or mouse driver software or different input methods altogether, such as speech recognition or Morse code.

Communication. These programs use synthesized speech or visual display as a tool for people who cannot speak.

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Who Should Use Active Accessibility for Java?

Accessibility aid providers. Use this specification to implement Active Accessibility in your accessibility aids so that software designed to work with it will work optimally with your products.

Software developers. Use Active Accessibility for Java to provide accessibility access in applications. Or, develop applications that are automatically accessibility-enabled by using class libraries like Microsoft Application Foundation Classes (AFC) that already support Active Accessibility for Java.

OS Vendors. Use this specification to implement Active Accessibility on your platform.

Customers with disabilities. Use applications that support Microsoft Active Accessibility for access to Java applications.

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Active Accessibility for Java Interface and Classes

Active Accessibility uses the IAccessible COM interface to provide accessibility support. The Microsoft AFC introduces a similar interface in its com.ms.ui package named IUIAccessible. AFC's UI base classes (UIApplet, UICanvas, UIFrame, UIPanel, and UIWindow) implement both the IAccessible interface and the IUIAccessible interface, providing an automatic conversion from COM types (particularly Variant) to more Java-like types (Components).

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The Microsoft Application Foundation Classes

The Microsoft Application Foundation Classes (AFC) is a comprehensive set of Java class libraries providing user interface controls. AFC's UI controls give Java developers a rich set of UI elements that they can quickly build compelling, flexible, and powerful user interfaces from for their applications. Written entirely in Java, AFC ensures that applications built using these classes can be written once to run on any of the popular Java platforms and virtual machines.

By implementing the IAccessible interfaces in the base AFC classes, Microsoft provides default support for accessibility. All the AFC UI controls, which extend from the base classes, then override the appropriate IUI methods to provide the proper accessibility information for each particular control, giving built-in accessibility support for all AFC UI control classes.

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