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JAVA

NOTE: Window-Eyes does not currently support JAVA applications, or JAVA applets. The following information was provided by Window-Eyes user Stephen Clower regarding the development of JAVA applications to conform to WIN32 standards. This information may be used to make JAVA applications more accessibile until Window-Eyes support for JAVA becomes available.

"There is a workable solution to at least make Java apps you write accessible. If one has source code for a Java program, it too can be made accessible with the following.

First, grab the SWT libraries from http://www.eclipse.org. SWT is IBM's answer to Sun's Swing classes. Unlike Swing, SWT interfaces directly with the Windows API to produce its controls. Therefore, if you create a button in SWT, the result is a native Win32 button which any screen reader can see; same goes with other SWT controls.

Once you have the SWT library, download the SwingWT library from http://swingwt.sourceforge.net. SwingWT is essentially a Swing/Awt wrapper for SWT, meaning you can write your applications using normal Swing objects, code, and so on, but import swingwt in place of swing. SwingWT emulates Swing, so to make a Java pane application accessible, just change the import statements and recompile.

Voila! Java app is now usable.

I will grant that this won't hold for apps with no accompanying source code, though it's conceivable that you could recompile swingwt and call it swing. Overwrite the original swing class files with the new swingwt library files, and even precompiled applications should become accessible. Ultimately, it would be great to have Java access via the access bridge, but for now this solution works well enough."

-- Stephen Clower

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