[ANN] Spell Catcher X 10.3 Accessibility Tools for Developers
[ANN] Spell Catcher X 10.3 Accessibility Tools for Developers
- Subject: [ANN] Spell Catcher X 10.3 Accessibility Tools for Developers
- From: Evan Gross <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:42:39 -0500
- Thread-topic: [ANN] Spell Catcher X 10.3 Accessibility Tools for Developers
Hi all,
Spell Catcher X 10.3, released in October (now at version 10.3.2) has some
developer tools that might come in handy for those working on text-related
accessible apps. A new-in-Spell Catcher X 10.3 feature called DirectCorrect
extracts text, attributes (styles, fonts), positioning and other information
from the underlying application. It draws a transparent overlay window that
highlights any errors, rendered as close as is possible to their appearance
in the document and on the screen. It follows along as the document is
edited and its onscreen position changes.
To implement DirectCorrect, Spell Catcher makes heavy use of various text
accessibility features, including virtually all text attributes (including
RTF), along with bounding rectangles such as character and line bounds,
shared text areas, ranges such as visible text range, selected range, and
probably a few others I've forgotten to mention.
As well, it uses many text input features - exercising almost all TSM and
TSM Document Access CarbonEvents. This encompasses NSTextInput
implementations, which are generally bridged (by the Mac OS) to their
equivalent CarbonEvent counterparts.
It works with pretty much any app that supports the Mac OS X Dictionary
Service (the pop-up panel - you know, command-control-d while hovering over
a word).
To get an idea of what sort of information you can get with Spell Catcher¹s
developer tools, pictures are, well, worth a whole lot of words.
Take a look at <http://www.rainmakerinc.com/developer/> to get an idea.
Various AXNotifications are also used to track window movement and sizing,
scrolling and modification of text areas, along with changes to text made
using menu commands, ruler changes and the like. Changing the background
opacity of the DirectCorrect overlay can make it obvious where bounding
rects for things like shared text areas (like TextEdit in wrap to page
mode). Areas that should be considered "invisible" like window grow areas,
toolbars, toolbar buttons and scroll bars are used to make sure nothing gets
drawn over areas that shouldn't be.
Anyway, certainly it's for specific types of accessible text (input)
development (seeing as the part of Spell Catcher that implements
DirectCorrect is an input method). But hopefully someone other than myself
will find it useful!
I'd be happy to hear from anyone that takes a look and actually finds it a
useful tool. Feel free to ask questions, make requests and reports bugs!
Thanks,
Evan Gross
--
Evan Gross, President, Rainmaker Research Inc.
Developers of Macintosh and Windows Software
Spell Catcher for Mac OS and Windows
http://www.rainmakerinc.com/
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