Hi David,
There was some discussion of this on the Java Access mailing list awhile back.
According to Peter Korn, the JAB does work on 64-bit Windows, though his
message only confirmed for Vista. You have to do a manual install.
I reposted his message on my website in hopes its useful. (I've not
tried it myself.)
http://www.travisroth.com/2009/07/03/java-access-bridge-and-64-bit-win
dows/
Btw, it appears the newest NVDA is getting some off screen model support. Its
not in the official release yet, but if you get a nightly build it should be
there. NVDA is definitely worth a try before resorting to Narrator. I do
recommend finding a more tolerable voice than eSpeak.
Also NVDA supports the JAB, and probably better than JAWS does as NVDA's
authors know how to write to an API.
-----Original Message-----ly
From: program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Lant
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 3:22 PM
To: program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [program-l] Re: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps
Hi,
Sorry to come in late on this, but I've been on holiday.
One thing I was surprised to discover, and I hope someone can indicate is
incorrect, is that there seems to be no 64-bit version of the Java Access
Bridge. This does rather leave newer systems in a worse state than older ones,
going by my current HP system. All the HP supplied utilities and applications
are Java based, and JAWS is absolutely dismal at working with them. Windows
Narrator is far better and the only way I can use the auto update feature is to
turn on Narrator for the duration. Even then it's very crude and
unsatisfactory, missing out whole swathes of information. But that's much
better than the complete absence of feedback from JAWS.
So, am I right in that 64-bit is not covered by Java Access Bridge and thus any
screen readers that require it? It's going to become an issue as I may have to
move into more Java based development work soon.
Thanks.
All the best,
David
David Lant
Applications analyst
MCPD Enterprise Application Development 3.5 MCTS ASP.NET 3.5, ADO.NET
3.5, Windows Communication Foundation 3.5, Windows Applications 3.5
-----Original Message-----
From: program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roopakshi
Pathania
Sent: 12 June 2010 04:53 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [program-l] Re: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps
Hi Jamal,
You left out Java Accessibility API that provides access to Swing based
applications on all platforms (not completely sure about Mac) through Java
Access Bridge.
In this regard, the guidelines laid down by IBM on developing a completely
accessible Java application are quite useful.
http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/software/accesssoftware.html
I like to point the developers of inaccessible applications to this page.
One more toolkit might be of interest: AxTk.
http://code.google.com/p/axtk/
It is built on wxWidgets and is especially geared towards screen reader users.
It is also suppose to have text to speech wrapper class supporting a number of
speech engines.
I’m building my own tools for financial and data analysis, so have looked at
cross-platform accessible libraries.
Regards
Roopakshi
--- On Sat, 6/12/10, Jamal Mazrui<empower@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Jamal Mazrui<empower@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps
To: "programmingblind"<programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 8:27 PM This is to share some points I
have learned about developing cross-platform, GUI-accessible, desktop
apps. Currently, the key is using programming libraries that wrap
native widgets of the platform. These native widgets generally
implement the main accessibility API of the platform, much more so
than custom widgets.
On Windows, native widgets are most likely to implement Microsoft
Active Accessibility, or increasingly, User Interface Automation as
it replaces MSAA. On Linux, the GTK+ widgets that are native to the
Gnome desktop implement the Assistive Technology Service Provider
Interface. On the Mac, Cocoa-based widgets implement the Mac
Accessibility Protocol.
Thus, a cross-platform library is most likely to create accessible
GUIs if it wraps native widgets of each platform, rather than
defining its own widgets. A disadvantage of this approach is that
the developer needs to be conscious of small differences in the
behavior of widgets across platforms, even though wrapping code of
the library tries to minimize such differences. Besides
accessibility, an advantage of this approach is that widgets have the
look and feel that sighted users are accustomed to experiencing on each
platform.
Sometimes, a GUI library is closely associated with a programming
language that has especially strong support for that library in
wrapper functions and design tools. A few language and library
combinations that seem to work particularly well for cross-platform,
accessible development are as follows:
* Java and the Standard Widget Toolkit http://www.eclipse.org/swt/
* Python and wxWidgets
http://wxPython.org
* C# and the System.Windows.Forms classes of the Mono Framework
http://mono-project.org
Note that, in this case, the Microsoft .NET Framework should be used
as the runtime environment on Windows in order to have native widget
support.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx
If others have further info or ideas on this topic, please share.
Jamal
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