BUILDING AN ACCESSIBLE SILVERLIGHT EXPERIENCE CL51 Mark Rideout Silverlight Program Manager Microsoft blogs.msdn.com/markrideout/

Agenda  Why  What  Where  When  How

First a statement... You can build accessible experiences and applications with Silverlight.

Why  Increase adoption  Increased potential cliental  Legal requirements

What  Guidelines and Legal legislation  Section 508c, WCAG 2.0, WAI  Examples of screen readers  JAWS, NVDA, Windows Eyes, Narrator, etc.  Screen Reader rely on  UI Automation  MSAA  DOM access  Screen scrape

Where  Keyboard  Application functions can be done without a mouse  Visual  Application is “visible” to a screen reader  Application can be used by users with low visual acuity  Audio  Your media can be “read” and not heard

When  Start Early  Designers - Good design doesn’t mean accessible  Developers - Implement with accessibility  Check often  Testers - Check throughout at major milestones  Developers – Use UI Spy and AccExplorer  Verify - Run tools like UIA Verify and AccChecker

How - Keyboard Keyboard accessibility Demo

How – Keyboard  Review  Looks nice  Not accessible  Use Controls for tab/focus support  Handle keystrokes for custom keyboard actions  Be aware of keystroke limitations for hotkeys

How - Visual Silverlight and Screen Reader Demo

How – Visual  Review  Use built in controls and retemplate  Some controls need additional metadata  If building “from scratch” create own AutomationPeer  Identify non text (e.g. images)  AutomationProperties.Name

How – Visual  High contrast  Look at SystemParameters.HighContrast  Use System Colors theme (Silverlight Toolkit)  Don’t rely on color  Add some other shapes or text styling  Zoom and larger text  Ensure app scales with browser zoom  Provide text-sizing UI control

How – Audio  Use pre-built “media players”  Accessible Media Project (AMP)  Expression Encoder  Close captioning

Now  Call To Action  Accessibility is important  Design and develop with Accessibility in mind  Use best practices (avoid “bad” practices)  Test accessibility

Resources  Section 508:  WCAG 2.0:  (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)  Other global legislation:  UIA Verify:  AccChecker:  UI Spy:  AccExplorer: 582A-A A-BF E13F A-A A-BF E13F0  Accessible Media Project:  Blog:  CoDe Accessibility Article: magazine.com/articleprint.aspx?quickid= &printmode=truehttp:// magazine.com/articleprint.aspx?quickid= &printmode=true