The last months I was busy implementing accessibility support for the upcoming Mac version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 aka StarOffice 9.

Mac OS X comes with a standardized accessibility API (NSAccessibility protocol) that makes it easy for application and accessibility tool developers to interoperate. But since we do not use standard Cocoa controls we had to implement Objective-C wrapper objects around our C++ controls to feed the accessibility tools on the Mac.

At this point I would like to thank Apple's engineers Patti Hoa and James Dempsey. They really helped us a lot and kindly answered all of our questions very quickly.

Most of the development work was tested with VoiceOver, a screenreader that is also part of Mac OS X since Tiger. The first step was to build the control hierarchy in the way the NSAccessibility protocol likes to have it. After that was done we added more and more attributes to our API implementation and started to support actions and notifications.

After this was done VoiceOver was pretty usable together with OpenOffice.org. Peter Korn (Sun's accessibility architect) presented it at the 2008 CSUN Conference and got positive feedback. The build Peter used for his presentation was almost identical to the later released OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta.

Since then we did mainly bug fixing and now we are satisfied with the state of the accessibility support on Mac OS X. Please note that there were no changes between Beta and Beta 2 regarding this.

If you are interested in trying it and are not used to VoiceOver, there are excellent manuals available from Apple for download for Tiger and Leopard. I suggest you use the english version of OpenOffice.org and switch your international setting to english, because the voices that come with Mac OS X are only for this locale.

For those of you wanting to dive in here are some quick start instructions.

First of all you should activate general accessibility support. Go to "System Preferences -> Universal Access" and select the "Enable support for assistive devices" checkbox. VoiceOver itself can be (de-)activated using command-F5.

Just start OpenOffice.org and create - let's say - a new text document. While using VoiceOver a black border is drawn around the active control. This is known as the VoiceOver cursor. You can move it with ctrl-option-cursor keys. As an alternative to that just use the OpenOffice.org keys, e.g. F6 toggles between the toolboxes and the document area and the tab key jumps from one toolbox item to the next. The VoiceOver cursor will follow the focus. While typing in the document area VoiceOver will give feedback on every pressed key. To move through some text word-wise simply use option-cursor right or option-cursor left.

Have fun!