Accerciser Manual Eitan Isaacson eitan@ascender.com Peter Parente pparent@us.ibm.com Introduction, Getting Started, Usage, Default Plugins, Preferences, About Accerciser, Accerciser Manual

This manual describes the use of Accerciser.

Introduction

Accerciser is an interactive Python accessibility explorer for the GNOME desktop. It uses AT-SPI to inspect and control widgets, allowing you to check if an application is providing correct information to assistive technologies and automated test frameworks. Accerciser has a simple plugin framework which you can use to create custom views of accessibility information.

In essence, Accerciser is a next generation at-poke tool.

Getting Started

You can start Accerciser in the following ways:

Applications

Choose the ProgrammingAccerciser menu item.

Command line

Type the following command in a console window then press Return: accerciser

When you start Accerciser, the following window is displayed.

Shows Accerciser main window. Contains title bar, menu bar, accessible tree, right plugin display area, and bottom plugin display area. The menu bar contains File, Edit, Bookmarks, View, and Help menus.

The main Accerciser window contains the following elements:

Menubar

The menu bar contains commands for managing plugins, managing and using bookmarks, refreshing the accessible tree view, and accessing this help system.

 Accessible tree view

The accessible tree view allows to view all of the accessibles starting at the desktop level. Selecting an accessible makes it available for further inspection using the loaded plugins.

 Right plugin view

This is one of the two default plugin views. When Accerciser is first run, most plugins will reside here. You can drag plugin tabs to the bottom plugin view or to the desktop to show two or more plugins simultaneously.

 Bottom plugin view

You can drag plugins to or from this area just like the right plugin view.

Accerciser has two modes for viewing plugins. The current view mode could be toggled with ViewSingle plugin view or by pressing Controlt. When single mode is enabled, all plugins will be put in the top right plugin view and ordered alphabetically, this could be useful for screen reader users who have no use for Accerciser's flexible plugin spacial layout scheme. When single view mode is disabled plugin tabs could be dragged and dropped in to different plugin views, or could be dragged to the desktop to put the given plugin in a new view. The placement of plugins could also be manipulated with the plugin context menu that could be brought up either from the plugin tab, or the plugin preferences dialog.