InstallAware Accessibility Support

[ryan_schipper]

Hello,

I work for a company using the InstallAware deployment product in order to develop our product installers.

Due to business requirements, I am seeking information about accessibility support of installers generated by InstallAware. Specifically, the compatibility of generated installers with the JAWS screen reader.

Having generated an installer, I have found that the screen reader reads Dialog titles and buttons when I tab to them. However, nothing else on the dialog is read.

After searching the internet, installaware's home pages and the forums, I was unable to find any information about InstallAware-generated installer's accessibility features.

I would appreciate it if someone here could provide me with technical resources or information regarding these features.

Thank you

R. Schipper

[polo]

Four years later... (A.D. 2011) I stil cannot find any word concerning InstallAware 10.10 and accessibility.

My expectation:
If "High Contrast" is turned on in Windows, so should the installer detect it and change its background and foreground colors according to the high contrast color schema. I'm using the standard installing theme "Official" and there are white letters on the white background.

Which theme is High Contrast aware, if any?

regards

[giaviv]

Dear polo,

No theme is contrast aware, however InstallAware allows you to design your own dialogs, which might be the solution here.

[tofutim]

Is there a way to detect high contrast? I just ran into a customer with some vision issues and he has the machine on high contrast. This makes a number of dialog windows unreadable.

[FrancescoT]

Dear Tofutim,

Actually for what I know high contrast detection can be done calling WIN API function"SystemParametersInfo".
Please refer to MSDN documetation for more detailed informations.

Regards

[tofutim]

I discovered that if you delete the background image from the "Plain" theme, you will be left with a gray (dialog) background which is High Contrast aware. When flipped to high contrast, the background will properly turn to black and the text to white/yellow. However, I have not found a good way to incorporate an image.

[tofutim]

The default color for the background of the dialog without an image is clBtnFace - this is not a color available in the pick box, but you can type it in. It is a Window's based gray that will turn black when High Contrast is on.

[tofutim]

Francesco, any chance you can fetch us the secret menu of secret colors? Besides clBtnFace, I bet there is a cl* which is normally white but black at high contrast (instead of starting at gray)

[tofutim]

So far...

clBtnFace - gray
clBtnText - black
clWindowText - black
clBtnShadow - darker gray
clBackground - black
clButtonHighlight - white
clGrayText - another gray
clInactiveBorder - light gray
clBackground - black
clWindow - white

these must be standard windows descriptions somehow.

[FrancescoT]

Dear Tofutim,

I suppose these are the system colors as defined with Delphi.

Anyway, these are very similar to the COLOR DEFINES available with the WINAPI (COLOR_BTNFACE, COLOR_BTNTEXT and so on) ... and often different "defines" point to the same identical RGB color value.

Regards