Accessibility Support for UI for UWP

The move to open source was a big change for Telerik UI for UWP. See what’s new after recent the open source announcement.

In February, we announced that Telerik UI for UWP would be going open source and the reception from the community has been great. We’ve got our first contributors and have provided lots of additions to the project ourselves. In the last couple of months, plenty of improvements were made both in the controls and the code as well as the repo to make it even easier to navigate and use. The CI build was also put in place, and will get merged to the main branch soon. The biggest feature we’ve added is support for accessibility, which I would like to share more details on.

For the full list of new features and improvements to the Progress Telerik products, make sure to sign up for the Telerik R2 Release Webinar.

Keyboard

IsTabStop and TabIndex are fully functional for all controls as well as the tab orders of composite elements such as ListBox, Grid and Radial Menu.

For UI elements that can be invoked, keyboard event handlers for the Spacebar and Enter keys are introduced. This makes the basic keyboard accessibility support complete and enables users to accomplish basic app scenarios using only the keyboard. That is, users can reach all interactive UI elements and activate the default functionality.

Where arrow key navigation is applicable for navigating among child elements, this was also put in place.

Automation Peers

Telerik UI for UWP provides built-in support for Microsoft UI Automation—the accessibility framework for Microsoft Windows. UI Automation support is implemented through a tree of peer classes that derive from FrameworkElementAutomationPeer. We follow the convention about naming the peer classes—they begin with the control class name and end with “AutomationPeer”.

HighContrast Theme

All controls support high contrast theme and when the Widows theme is switched to high contrast, the controls will change their theme accordingly. High contrast themes use a small palette of contrasting colors that makes the interface easier to see.

Head to GitHub for a checklist of all Telerik UI for UWP accessible controls.

In Closing

Take a look at the OSS project when you have a chance, and feel free to share any feedback or add your own contributions.

Lastly, if you will be attending Microsoft //Build next week, be sure to stop by our Booth (#108) for some demos and discussions with the product team.