Accessibility in the WIn32 API

Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Department of Information Processing Science
University of Oulu
A report for the Programming Environments Course

Warning

This is a quick translation of the original document written in Finnish. I still feel the translation is a bit clunky and would have probably done better, had I done the assignment in English initially. Also, my usual style switching code doesn't currently work on the site, as this is a different machine hosting the document.

Version History

12.1.2005: Added this English Translation.
18.9.2004: Problems with the HTML-formatted sources. Moved the example app inside a zip-archive.
16.9.2004: The Initial version.

Table of Contents

1. The Windows Operating System and the Win32 Application Programming Interface

2. Overview of Accessibility and Hooks
2.1. Accessibility Means Ease of Use for People ¨with Special Needs
2.2. Screen Readers Interpret the Graphical User INterface as Text
2.3. Windows and Messages in Windows
2.4. Hooks for Handling Messages

3. Screen Reading in Practise
3.1. The Example Application
3.2. DLL-libraries are the Prerequisite for System-wide Hooking
3.3. Setting up and Removing Hooks and Some Hook Functions
3.4. CBT-hooks Follow the Focus and Changes in the Active Window
3.5. CALLWNDPROC Hooks System Messages
3.6. Common Window Functions
3.7. Finding out Button Types and States
3.8. Tracking the Menus

4. Things not Discussed
Appendix A: References
Appendix B: The source Code for the Example Application in a Zip Archive
Appendix C: The Example Program binaries (syshook.exe, hooklib.dll)

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions
Drop Me a Line here

Back to Programming
Back to Main Page