The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Nov. 07, 2000
Filed:
Mar. 11, 1997
Charles Oppermann, Redmond, WA (US);
Laura J Butler, Seattle, WA (US);
Steven M Donie, Seattle, WA (US);
Peter Kam-Ho Wong, Mercer Island, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
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.