Mac:Accessibility/UniversalAccess

Quick Reference for Universal Access

This is a quick reference for Apple's accessibility APIs. Most of this info is gathered from Apple's page about the NSAccessibility protocol.

In the following sections, we will use a few commonly used acronyms for convenience:

• AT, means Assistive Technology, or simply a 3rd party application, e.g., a Screen Reader.
• UA refers to Universal Access - Apple's name for all of their accessibility APIs.

About attributes

Every widget that is made accessible supports a range of attributes.

An AT can query the widget for the attributes it supports, and then get to know more information about each individual attribute.

An attribute might be a widget's role, its value, or what actions it supports.

See the full list of attributes.

About notifications

UA sends out a notification to any obsering AT when some events occur. This is regular notifications, that are used throughout Cocoa.

See the list of all accessibility-specific notifications.

About actions

Actions are those that let the user interact with the software, e.g., via a Screen Reader or any other AT device.

Full list of actions

Comments, suggestions, etc

Feel free to add and improve this reference, or even copy it to another wiki. At the moment, there is no good resource about these APIs except for Apple's pages, which in some cases have been found to be outdated and incorrect.

--HakanW 09:36, 8 May 2006 (PDT)