Description

You can build accessibility features into your applications to comply with the U.S. Federal Government's Section 508 §1194.1 standard for making software applications accessible to those with disabilities. This standard specifies how accessibility aids obtain information about user interface elements and how software applications expose the attributes and behavior of UI elements to those aids.

Usage

PowerBuilder provides features that enable applications to conform to the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) Version 2 guidelines. PowerBuilder controls support all required IAccessible properties.

For graphic objects, you can manipulate the IAccessible Name, Role and Description properties for each control using PowerBuilder dot notation or the Other page in the Properties view of the painters. The IAccessible property KeyboardShortcut can also be manipulated using PowerBuilder properties (wherever the ampersand in text property and accelerator property are supported). Other IAccessible properties are set automatically via default proxy support (for example, location is automatically updated with absolute screen coordinates for Windows controls at runtime).

For the DataWindow control and its descendants, PowerBuilder creates objects that implement the Microsoft IAccessible interface and passes the objects' pointers to the accessibility aid. The assistive technology then traverses the DataWindow object tree, and navigation functions such as accNavigate and get_accChild return IAccessible pointers to it.

The AccessibleName and AccessibleDescription properties take string values. The AccessibleRole property takes a value of the AccessibleRole enumerated variable.

There are some limitations in accessibility support in the DataWindow. The following are not supported:

• Composite, Crosstab, and Graph DataWindow presentation styles
• CheckBox, RadioButtons, DropDownDataWindow, and DropDownListBox edit styles for column controls
• Bitmap, Graph, and GroupBox controls

Example

The following statements set the IAccessible properties for a command button in a Window:

cb_1.accessiblename = "Delete"
cb_1.accessibledescription = "Deletes selected text"
cb_1.accessiblerole = pushbuttonrole!

The following statement sets the AccessibleName property of a button in a DataWindow object:

dw_1.Object.b_1.accessiblename = "Update"

For more information

For more information, see the online Help and the chapter on accessibility in Application Techniques.