We are testing accessibility this week. It means to check all the dialogs/menus/wizards/etc. in IDE that they implement Accessible interface, that the provide AccessibleName and Description. We also check the correct mnemonics, tab traversal. This kind of testing is required by Section 508 - more details.We use a tool for our testing. It is UI Accessibility Tester. We install it as NB module and then run it with icon from NetBeans IDE. But sometimes you need to start the A11Y tester before the application is started. It's needed in cases when you are testing dialogs that appears right after the startup of NetBeans - e.g. Registration wizard.
Start UI Accessibility Tester before the application
- Copy a11y.jar from a11y.nbm/netbeans/modules/ to $JDKHOME/jre/lib/ext directory under your JDK installation
- Modify (create one if it doesn't exist) your $JDKHOME/jre/lib/accessibility.properties file to include the following line - assistive_technologies=org.netbeans.a11y.tester.UIAccessibilityTester
- Start IDE
