Community
Participate
Working Groups
To check my new Eclipse product for accessibility and 508 Compliance I have been working with my machine in high contrast mode From the control panel select Accessibility Options and then the display tab - now tick the high contrast box. Any apps running try to adapt but it is best to stop Eclipse and restart it because it then picks up more of the High Contrast colours and sizes. In general wizards are not very useable as they lose things off the end of the page and do not put in scroll bars so that you can reach information that you know is there - try some of the New wizards such as creating a new fragment to see this. I would think this makes Eclipse non 508 Compliant unless there is a way to get to the wizard information I have not found. I also have wizards in my product which can not be completely viewed so again it looks as if my product will be non compliant unless a fix is found for this. Any information on when this will be fixed in Eclipse or work rounds that can be used would be appreciated.
Have you got any update to this problem report. Eclipse is not Section 508 compliant with this problem - if you try and access many of the panels in the Windows preference page when in high contrast mode then it impossible to reach some of the items. I now need to add my own product preference pages and they have the same problem that you can't get to items at the bottom of the pages. I have tried adding scroll bars to my preference pages. However if the preference dialog is resized, the window border shrinks right over the scroll bars, so the user is unable to see/use them. These pages need something added to them by Eclipse to make them accessible.
The OS does not give us an update when the settings are changed so you have to restart Eclipse - this is a known windows limitation. If you restart an the wizards in your products cannot be viewed you should log reports to the teams that provide them. We can only provide the framework. I think you need to read the 508 spec. There is nothing there to my knowledge about restarting a product being a problem with compliance. Something being unreadable is an if there is something you can use in High Contrast you should inform the team in question. BTW High Constrast is supported at resolution 1172x768 in Eclipse. You should check at the resolution.
Hello Tod, Sorry I have not explained the problem very well - yes I know that having to restart Eclipse once you have set up high contrast mode is not a compliance issue. I am working on Windows XP I switch high contrast on by going to the control panel accessibility option and tick the High Contrast box on the display panel and have a setting of High Contrast Black (Large) - so I don't know the resolution - this is the standard way the IBM Accessibility Checklist states to turn high contrast on. Once in high contrast mode I start Eclipse and go Windows, Preferences - many of the panels can not be seen fully for example the Java page has 4 sections on it but in high contrast mode you can't see the bottom one (search) so the user would not even know it is there so it is inaccessible.This is just one of several examples as you go through the preferences. I believed that we need the frame work to be updated to allow products to create their preference pages so that the users can scroll down to the bottom of the page - I don't think its is something that can be done by individuals contributing pages. Please have a go with your system in High contrast mode to see if you experience the same difficulties and if there is a way you think my product can put pages on that are accessible then please let me know as we have tried and failed several times. Thanks Kim.
Basically all you need to do is create pages that fit on the monitor - you just need to test your pages to see if they get cut off. The wizard expands based on the computed size of the supplied pages so you need to make sure that computeSize is fine for you. The usual issue is that you have a layout that does not size something big enough or you have too much content for the screen. There is no magic to be done on our part - you just need to design components that fit in the space accessibility gives you. We haven't gone through our 3.1 verification of our plug-ins yet. If you find a page that has an issue please log a report to the team that supplies it (in your example Search). The IBM checklist does not specify a resolution so products have to choose one that is reasonable. Eclipse chose 1152x768.
Tod Even with the resolution that Eclipse has chosen of 1152x768; if a High- Contrast scheme is chosen with a Large or Extra Large font then only a very few controls can be added to a preference page if all the page is to be visible at once. This would mean that a lot more preference pages would have to be provided, often with related content spread across several pages, and each containing a large blank area if a High-Contrast scheme is not in use. The solution that is needed is for preference pages to be able to have scroll bars, so that the user can scroll (using a mouse OR the keyboard) to view the content of the page should it be larger than that currently visible on the display. If you run Eclipse with a High-Contrast scheme such as "High Contrast Black (extra large)"; it is readily apparent that quite a number of the Eclipse preference pages (and wizards) are not fully visible. The Eclipse development teams should be testing for and fixing these problems as part of complying with 508; My project is at a critical point at the moment and we can not spend time doing compliance testing for Eclipse itself and raising/managing bugzilla reports. I do not believe that these problems are new in 3.1 Kim
If you look at all of the Eclipse preference pages we test them all to work at this resolution - there may have been a couple of regressions that need fixing but you will see that quite a lot information still fits into that space. Some techiniques we use to break things up are tabbed folders and scrollbars. Scrollbars are tricky and look bad so I would avoid them - we have had better luck with tabs.
Marking as WORKSFORME. Please reopen if you think there is an issue for us to resolve
