While it could be argued that not all apps are accesible, I don't see any arguing that this is the fault of the application developers. The thing is that in Winblows it takes application support to make MSAA work. M$ Office is a great example of this effect. Because they created new controls that were not in MSAA definitions, MSAA failed to work with them. The same thing has happened to other programs. In short, the only way to program with known accessibility is to limit oneself to the M$ Foundation Library. But this negates the whole point of C++. A developer is supposed to be able to create a new control. Should it then rest on him to modify the OS so that speech works? My feeling is that MS has done a poor job of making their products accessable. This is a result of several factors. The first being that it is a late life after thought. Next, there is minimal support given to making/keeping it accessible. Someone said 12 developers are on the team. It sounds about right. The lack of commitment is further illustrated in IE4. It was known that MSAA would break. The product shipped anyway. It was promised to be right for Win98. That was an empty promise. I saw that one get cut. I knew one of the guys who was testing that (though not with a screen reader). Part of the problem is that Winblows is a cobbled OS. Part of that is due to market forces. Part is due to the desire to gain ever larger market share at any cost. I think eventually we will see the downfall of M$ because they can no longer build on what they have. Combine that with a refusal to start with new code. (Or the inability to do so.) The thing is that MS suffers from lack of documentation within their own code. There are segments that nobody there knows what the function is. But when said segment is pulled strange behaviors appear. Sometimes the fix for the problem is to turn it into a "feature" that can't be disabled. Such is the fate of the stupid tooltip that explains what the X in the upper right hand corner faced. The switch to turn it off broke and they didn't know why. In the end they just removed that from the config menus. Kirk Wood Cpt.Kirk at 1tree.net ------------------ Why can't you be a non-conformist, like everybody else?
