<Swing Dev> <AWT Dev> [12] JDK-7124285: Nothing heard from VoiceOver regarding the status of the progress bar

[Shashidhara Veerabhadraiah]

Hi Phil, Right, Accessibility in swing was way ahead and is still ahead of other alternatives. What I meant was that certain existing framework elements are used interchangeably between 'normal' mode of operation and in 'accessibility' mode. Probably we could have separated that out. Like for ex., focusability in the normal mode of operation means that the user needs to enter\edit some information and the same flag is used for accessibility too. And here software I meant the platform software as well, as they don't have a separate framework and they use the existing framework for accessibility as well where it may have a different meaning, causing certain confusion from developer's point of view.

Thanks and regards,
Shashi

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Race 
Sent: Friday, November 9, 2018 10:14 AM
To: Shashidhara Veerabhadraiah <shashidhara.veerabhadraiah at oracle.com>
Cc: Alexey Ivanov <alexey.ivanov at oracle.com>; Krishna Addepalli <krishna.addepalli at oracle.com>; Sergey Bylokhov <sergey.bylokhov at oracle.com>; awt-dev at openjdk.java.net; swing-dev at openjdk.java.net
Subject: Re: <Swing Dev> <AWT Dev> [12] JDK-7124285: Nothing heard from VoiceOver regarding the status of the progress bar



On 11/8/18, 9:10 AM, shashidhara.veerabhadraiah at oracle.com wrote:
>>
>> But your fix also changes the behaviour for the case where no 
>> accessibility is used: progress bar receives keyboard focus even 
>> though it never needs it because it does not support any input.
>>
>> It's just the other side of the coin.
> Very true. The problem is that our software never designed from the 
> accessibility stand point of view and we are trying to use the 
> existing framework for a different purpose(focusability). Hence it 
> leads to such confusions.

Whoa. I don't know what you mean here. Maybe it is very narrow but I can't let this pass.
Swing was absolutely designed with accessibility in mind. Probably the first and maybe only UI toolkit to have it designed in from inception. The accessibility team were embedded in the Swing team. There was nothing comparable anywhere else in 1997-8 (20 years ago!) So Java + Swing was years ahead of anything else anyone had and it is not fundamentally lacking even today.
Bugs, overlooked things, things that should be updated etc. sure.
But don't go propagating misinformation that A11Y was ignored in the design.

-phil.