Over the next few months, I will be interacting with Microsoft Access, Word, and Excel 2007 through Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) in C++. As my journey progresses, I will be posting the neat little tricks and painful quirks that I run into along the way. To start, here are a few resources you can use to read up on Microsoft Active Accessibility.
- Microsoft’s documentation on IAccessible interface
- Sara Ford’s Weblog on Accessibility
- User Interface Element References for Control in Accessibility
Over the past 6 months, I used MSAA to develop against Microsoft Access 2003. Although it was a painful process to get working, the end result gives quite a bit of flexibility in automating Access. That being said, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, and Accessibility has definitely left many things to be desired. In the next few weeks I will be posting about my first impressions of Accessibility and it’s inconsistencies.
