UIA and IAccessible2 - mozilla.dev.accessibility

Message from discussion UIA and IAccessible2
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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 09:11:43 -0600
To: dev-accessibil...@lists.mozilla.org
From: Richard Schwerdtfeger <sch...@us.ibm.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 09:11:36 -0600
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subject: UIA and IAccessible2
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Aaron Leventhal indicated that there were some questions about UI
Automation and its cohabitation with IAccessible2.

Currently, no major assistive technology vendor (ATV) supports UI
Automation (UIA). UIA is divided into a provider (application) and clie=
nt
side (ATV) API. The client side portion runs in managed code (.NET, c#,=

etc.). Today UIA requires ATVs to rewrite all or part of their software=
 to
run a managed environment. This has prevented ATV adoption of UIA.
Microsoft claims to be writing an unmanaged client-side UIA implementat=
ion
piece which ATVs can support but that is post Vista ship. Given that th=
is
has not been provided yet, and extremely few applications even support
UIA,, we believe UIA really needs much more testing with ATVs to prove =
that
is ready for wide scale adoption. Microsoft's challenge will be to get
large applications, like MS Office, and ATVs to support UIA and work ou=
t
any defects.

Now, all this said, the Vista desktop needed to be accessible so today
Vista access by screen readers is a combination of MSAA and screen
scraping. In short, access to the Vista desktop is like XP. Last year
Microsoft spent a significant effort adding the ability for screen read=
ers
and magnifiers to capture information drawn to the desktop to reproduce=

what is on XP. This capability is limited to the unmanaged environment.=

Microsoft has done some mapping back to MSAA from managed code to suppo=
rt
basic MSAA and some text access but it is limited. Consequently, suppor=
t
for unmanaged applications will depend on a client side unmanaged API
layer. Due to the limited number of managed applications there is littl=
e
business justification for ATVs to support them.

We do believe that more work will be required for application vendors t=
o
switch from MSAA to UIA. With IAccessible2 we complement MSAA, as is, a=
nd
we have fully tested ATV support today. Also, the effort to enable
IAccessible2 enabled applications on other platforms is significantly
smaller. We have heavily tested and designed IAccessible2 to work on an=

entire office suite and with input from the Mozilla foundation.
IAccessible2 is not new in that it is derived from APIs we helped desig=
ned
for UNIX and Java and which we have been working for some time.
IAccessible2 was designed with the help of ATVs like Freedom Scientific=
 and
GW Micro during its implementation on IBM's new office suite. Please my=

blog below for more information on the Missouri project.
We are also developing next generation tooling to support IAccessible2.=


UIA has also not been designed to support ARIA and so changes to UIA ma=
y be
required to support it. Going forward IAccessible2 is an open standard =
and
will allow others in industry to enhance it as new technology warrants =
it.
Proprietary APIs are much more restrictive and this kind of participati=
on
is very difficult. We believe they can both coexist on the same platfor=
m as
both are built on top of COM.

The significant value add of IAccessible2, for ATVs, is we do allow the=
m to
continue to run in process to get the performance enhancements they hav=
e
realized with MSAA. This may prove difficult with the provider/client
architecture in UIA.

In short, we believe the two will coexist but because UIA has not been =
used
by major application vendors and ATVs we believe it will take some time=
 to
be fully realized. In the meantime IAccessible2 will already have been
implemented to support large, rich, desktop applications and ARIA with =
full
ATV support. UIAs immediate value add will be for managed applications.=


Beyond Mozilla's planned IAccessible2 support in Firefox 3 and our
implementation in our Notes 8 productivity editors which support ODF we=

will be adding support in Eclipse. That work has just kicked off. By
implementing it in Eclipse any application built using Eclipse will be =
able
to make use of IAccessible2 and richer access. This will ultimately all=
ow
us to do rich model-based authoring tools in our Rational product line,=
 and
so on. Many vendor's products work on Eclipse,  ... IBM, SAP, etc.

There are other toolkit vendors and platform vendors planning to suppor=
t
IAccessible2 and I hope they will be making those announcements in the =
near
future.

Rich

Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review  Board
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer=