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[Igork]

Dear MC developers. Sometime ago I had posted a message regarding MC using the Microsoft active accessability for GUI controls. Today, I downloaded the new version of Media Center 10.0 and was pleasantly surprised. Now tree-view control and other buttons and controls work much better with speech program. I can actually read buttons, dialogs, go through audio library and so on. Only one thing does not work, all menus are still completely not accessable. I mean the application main menu and right-click menus. Would it be possible to use the Microsoft Active Accessability for menus as well? It would make MC quite accessable for the blind users.
  Will greatly appreciate your reply and thanks a lot for the really nice program.

[Matt]

We don't use system menus because they are too limited to support many of the functions and features we need.

However, can't a screen reader still read them since they have text on them?

If not, do you know what needs to be done to make them more usable?

Thanks!

[Igork]

Hi, Matt. Thanks for replying to my message. Actually, the screen reader can not read menus even they have text in it, probably because it is not a real text, it is a bitmap image of the text, which is in reality just a picture. Is it possible to make a skin, which would have a normal text instad of pictures for menus? I have never programmed with skins, so really don't know, what is and what is not possible. However since buttons and tree view of the MC library are readable with speech, it probably should be possible also to make menus, which would be readable. Another thing I found yesterday, what is not accessable is the song list.. When for example you are in the audio library, highlight the artist, then album, after thet you press the tab key to go to the list of songs for this albom, the screen reader says that you are in the fileView list view, however nothing is read when you move up or down. Does this view have any text? It should not be a problem to read the file list since navigating the library tree works fine, what is the difference?
 
  Thank you very much for looking at that.  

     Igor.

[Matt]

Even if we draw the backgrounds of items like menus, we still use regular system text drawing.

The file list is the same way.  It's a normal list control except we do the drawing.

Maybe Active Accessibility requires certain hooks be in the program that we don't currently have.  We'll do some research for v11.

Thanks Igor.