What is the AXSections accessibility attribute in OS X?
What is the AXSections accessibility attribute in OS X?
- Subject: What is the AXSections accessibility attribute in OS X?
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2016 08:26:38 -0400
I asked this question early yesterday on the accessibility-dev list and received no answers, so I thought I would try here.
Using my UI Browser application <pfiddlesoft.com/uibrowser>, I am seeing a new "AXSections" accessibility attribute in all windows of all applications in OS X 10.11 El Capitan, but I can find no reference to it online and no documentation for it. Can anybody enlighten me as to what it is and how it is meant to be used in assistive applications for persons with disabilities, or point me to documentation?
The AXSections attribute returns an array of dictionaries, where each dictionary has three items with keys "SectionDescription", "SectionObject" and "SectionUniqueID".
As you can see from the examples below, I have run across a total of four kinds of unique IDs for AXSections attributes, so far; namely, AXContent, AXContentNavigator, AXTopLevelNavigator, and AXSearch. From these, and from the nature of the standard UI elements that are associated with them, I suspect that AXSections is a new attribute designed to categorize key functional sections of any application window into a very small number of core operations that are common to most applications. This could be used to help assistive applications guide users to the most important parts of any application window. (However, I don't understand why the AXSections attribute is marked as settable.)
For example, the AXSections attribute in a TextEdit window contains two array items:
SectionDescription = "content"
SectionObject = an AXUIElementRef object
SectionUniqueID = "AXContent"
SectionDescription = "top level navigator"
SectionObject = an AXUIElement object
SectionUniqueID = "AXTopLevelNavigator
A Finder window's AXSections attribute adds a third kind:
SectionDescription = "search"
SectionObject = an AXUIElementRef object
SectionUniqueID = "AXSearch"
An Xcode window's attribute adds a fourth:
SectionDescription = "content navigator"
SectionObject = an AXUIElementRef object
SectionUniqueID = "AXContentNavigator"
The AXUIElementRef objects are always standard UI elements that perform a function aptly described by the SectionDescription. For example, the AXContent item for a TextEdit window refers to an AXTextArea UI element, and the AXSearch item for a Finder or Xcode window refers to an AXTextField with a subrole of AXSearchField.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
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