Accessibility of the pdfCreator GUI

I am a rehab engineer working with a client who is blind. She recently received a promotion and her new duties include using PDF Creator.

I have been trying to write custom scripts for her screen reader --Jaws–but am having difficulty. I have several questions about how the GUI was built. Specifically, one tool I have to analyze applications reports that the interface has active MSAA components, but several of the objects do not have Names.

In “What’s New” I read that hotkeys were assigned to the command buttons, but I cannot find any documentation for those hotkeys. Does anyone know what these hotkeys are?

Hi Bruce, I am afraid the accessibility is currently very limited and the shortcuts only work for some elements of the print job dialog, but not the actual buttons. You can use alt + the underlined characters to navigate through the different fields for the metadata. Perhaps the best solution to overcome this issue is to write custom scripts for the PDFCreator COM interface, so all navigation / user interaction is performed only on the script and not PDFCreator itself. There is a ticket to improve the accessibility, but no way to tell when this might get implemented.

Best regards,

Robin

I am curious. Why did you assign an accessible name to all of the elements EXCEPT the buttons? And hotkeys?

Hi,

the accesible names for the other elements were assigned automatically, so it is more or less random and not intentional.

Best regards,

Robin