aViewer – accessibility inspection tool on Github

April 22, 2015Technical

TPGi are pleased to announce that, with the support of Google, the aViewer accessibility object inspection tool source code is now available on Github under an open source licence.

The Accessibility Viewer (aViewer) is an inspection tool for Windows that displays the accessibility API information (MSAA, IAccessible2, UI Automation, ARIA, HTML DOM) exposed by web browsers to the operating system, and thus to any assistive technology (AT) such as screenreaders.

We thank Dominic Mazzoni and Google for their interest and support to help make aViewer an open source project. We look forward to contributions to further develop aViewer. And we thank Jun for his continued commitment and dedication over the past 10 years to the development of the accessibility testing tools that TPGi makes available to the web development and accessibility community.

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About Steve Faulkner

Steve was the Chief Accessibility Officer at TPGi before he left in October 2023. He joined TPGi in 2006 and was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at vision australia. Steve is a member of several groups, including the W3C Web Platforms Working Group and the W3C ARIA Working Group. He is an editor of several specifications at the W3C including ARIA in HTML and HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0. He also develops and maintains HTML5accessibility and the JAWS bug tracker/standards support.

Comments

Kelly says:
April 23, 2015 at 2:53 pm

This is promising. If only Google would use its enormous resources to build accessibility into its Chrome browser. Doing that would show a real commitment to accessibility rather than small gestures such as this.

Steve Faulkner says:
April 23, 2015 at 3:22 pm

Hi Kelly,
I consider that Google are doing a lot of work to improve accessibility support into chrome, what issues in particular are you concerned with?

Kelly says:
April 24, 2015 at 7:18 pm

Hi Steve, Can the regular Chrome browser be used with a screen reader such as JAWS or Internet Explorer? Last I heard, it was necessary to use a self-voicing version of Chrom called Chrome vox that required the blind end user to unload his screen reader to use Chrome Vox and then load it again to access the Windows file system or other programs. If this has changed, please let me know.

Steve Faulkner says:
April 24, 2015 at 8:23 pm

Can the regular Chrome browser be used with a screen reader such as JAWS

Yes. In fact it provides better support for accessibility semantics than Internet Explorer. This does not always translate to better support by windows screen readers though as they hack around IE’s issues while not yet officially supporting chrome.

Neil says:
April 25, 2015 at 10:51 pm

would be so cool if https://www.html5accessibility.com/ included a timeline graph showing browsers “rating”. something like the followings https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html#fsCanvas