From: V Stuart Foote Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 8:25 PM > >Going to try removing JRE 1.7u11 and backing up to 1.6u39 to see if that has >an impact, but if IAccessibile2 is >functional--should not need a JRE, right?
So an uninstall of JRE 1.7u11 did set everything right with this initial build of the ia2 branch, a big thanks Ariel for building and posting to get the QA effort rolling. And congratulations to Steve and all the ia2 branch team for some very solid work on the merge! With no JRE the, Open Accessibility (A11y) group's AccProbe Eclipse RCP can not run, but comfortable to say the \winaccessibility IAccessible2 implementation is already matching support Symphony 3.0.1 fix pack 2 for basic MSAA/IAccessible & IAccessible2 roles. Folks doing QA will need to use AccProbe so should go ahead and install either JRE 1.6u39 or JRE 1.7u13, but Java Access Bridge is NOT a requirement for full function of the ia2 branch. Since I still fight with LibreOffice and the JAB I went with the JRE 1.6u39 install--the JRE 1.7 builds with JAB 2.0.3 are still a problem ( https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121510 ) Only a couple of hours into the interface and working out the testing tools--the a11y project's AccProbe is going to need some work, but it or something similar is necessary for working on correctness of IAccessibility2 events and roles. I have to dig deeper, but I do think there are some pretty big holes in what is instrumented. At the same time, I found Microsofts AccEvent and especially the Inspect tools from the Windows 8 SDK very helpful. I started leaving the Inspect panel running minimized and popping it open to review non-sounding actions in the GUI. And if working with a screen reader, folks should note that when using a current release of NVDA (2012.3.1) the NV Access developers have put a lot of effort into the project to read UI Automation and MSAA events--so it is not purely dependent on IAccessible2 rendering of UNO Accessibility API roles and events for the user interface. Its a hybrid, but it is already working as well with the ia2 branch as with the last Symphony builds and I think on a par with GNOME Orca for LibreOffice, I don't have access to JAWS but suspect there will be similar improvements in fidelity over Java Access Bridge based Accessibility and AT support there as well.
