Hi Shaun,
Well, I agree that something like UI Automation is way over do, but it
doesn't do any good to spend time on should've, could've, or would'ive
because the fact of the matter is the technology is here now and we
should be glad its coming. Plus you must remember that these are
different times, new laws, etc have came into effect since all that old
stuff was created.
For example, MSAA was first introduced for Windows 95 in the mid 90's
and became a standard feature of Windows 98. From what I've seen in
programming accessibility was primarily bolted on to the OS as an after
thought and screen reader developers had to come up with mirror drivers,
scripts, etc to make up for the lack of accessibility in applications.
However, in 2001 the ADA was amended with section 508 which makes it
mandatory that all software purchased by and used by the U.S. government
must be accessible to people with physical disabilities. That law pretty
much got the software industry moving on access and why Apple,
Microsoft, and Linux developers have been devoting more and more time to
improving the accessibility of their operating systems. Even operating
systems such as FreeBSD are reasonably accessible with the Gnome desktop
and Orca which wasn't the case up until a few years ago.
Bottom line, asking why Microsoft did or didn't do this or that earlier
is a waist of time. I think the simplest answer is they were not
interested in developing a better solution until Section 508 made it
mandatory that they do so in order to have their software used by the
U.S. government. Plus Microsoft is the leader in software for the PC,
and it would be rather ironic if they fell behind Apple or an upstart
like Linux in terms of accessibility, because both Apple's Cocoa and
Linux's at-spi technology centralize accessibility through a single API
which is what Microsoft is attempting to do now as well.
Cheers!
On 3/14/2012 5:46 PM, shaun everiss wrote:
well it looks at least from the gwmicro win8 podcast that ms is
intigrating all this internally for screen readers which in my view
should have done already!!
Msaa was ok but it only did ms spaciffic controls as far as I
understand it.
Sapi was speech, intercepters were needed so the readers could get
data from the graphics card, text and other junk piped to them, though
I don't know the full story.
The mirror driver was to make that so it didn't mangle things when
chains were broken.
Ms is doing the right thing by intigrating this into the os.
However, after getting reader manufacturers to use and or make
multipul libraries, its just a stupid waste of time.
Now we need to fix things so we can get access to the system, that
should have been there in the first place.
It will probably be easier to fix being only 1 set of libs now, but
because we worked with several we have to port which is a real nucence.
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