Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Charles Oppermann

Laura Janet Butler

Peter Kam-Ho Wong

Robert George Atkinson

Nathaniel S Brown

Gregory C Lowney

Steven M Donie

An architecture is provided that enables an accessibility aid to directly access and manipulate user interface elements of an application program programmatically. Moreover, such access and manipulation occurs in an application-independent manner, so that an accessibility aid utilizing the architecture can access any application program that conforms to the architecture, without the accessibility aid needing any prior knowledge of the application program or its user interface elements. User interface elements typically have both a visual representation displayed on the video display and an implementation, which is the code and data implementing the user interface element. The architecture provides an accessibility aid with direct access to the implementation of user interface elements, thus enabling the accessibility aid to both examine various characteristics of the user interface element and manipulate these characteristics, which may affect its visual representation.

Programmatically providing direct access to user interface elements of an application program

An architecture is provided that enables an accessibility aid to directly access and manipulate user interface elements of an application program programmatically. Moreover, such access and manipulation occurs in an application-independent manner, so that an accessibility aid utilizing the architecture can access the user interface elements of any application program that conforms to the architecture, without the accessibility aid needing any prior knowledge of the application program or its user interface elements. User interface elements typically have both a visual representation displayed on the video display and an implementation, which is the code and data implementing the user interface element. The architecture provides an accessibility aid with direct access to the implementation of user interface elements, thus enabling the accessibility aid to both examine various characteristics of the user interface element and manipulate these characteristics, which may affect its visual representation. Although this architecture provides many benefits to accessibility aids, some application programs predate the preferred architecture and are thus unable to support this architecture. The present system supports the architecture on behalf of such application programs, known as legacy application programs, to retrofit or integrate these application programs into the architecture.

Providing access to user interface elements of legacy application

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Charles Oppermann