Yes, Jamal is correct. The access bridge now belongs to Oracle and there is some questions as to whether it will be upgraded to handle 64 bit platforms. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jamal Mazrui" <empower@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 11:10 AMSubject: RE: [program-l] Re: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps (fwd)
I thought this discussion about the Java Access Bridge on 64-bit Windows may be of interest here as well. Jamal ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:42:53 -0500 From: Travis Roth <travis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: 'Jamal Mazrui' <empower@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: RE: [program-l] Re: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps Hi Jamal,In answer to your question: I do not know. It kind of sounded like Windows Vista was creating some sort of 32-64 bit bridge? There also was a new message on the Java Access mailing list this morning that essentially said all bets are off for Windows 7 64-bit. No word on if/when the JAB will be updated.
I do have the JAB running on Win7 32-bit at least. -----Original Message----- From: Jamal Mazrui [mailto:empower@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:22 AM To: program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: Travis Roth Subject: Re: [program-l] Re: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps Hi Travis,Thanks for this info. I am puzzled, however. Since JAWS on 64-bit Windows is a 64-bit process, I would not think it could work successfully with a 32-bit Access Bridge. My understanding is that, in general, a 64-bit process cannot use a 32-bit DLL or 32-bit COM server.
If that is not the case, can you or someone else explain this further? Jamal On 6/28/2010 5:02 PM, Travis Roth wrote:
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 thelook 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. 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