Hope all readers in the US had a nice thanksgiving.  I wanted to share a recent encounter I had with software that was inaccessible.  I was recently interested in turning my Macbook Pro into a multi-platform machine so I could easily move back and fourth between operating systems.  The benefits are pretty obvious I think.  For this purpose I took a look at Virtual Box which is an open source virtual machine program.  The install process went flawlessly on the mac, but when it came to running the program, Voiceover was unable to read any of the text or controls.  Apparently the culprit is the fact that they are using a GUI library known as QT.  The benefits of QT is that it is cross-platform, but on the other hand it does not use native controls of the operating system.  Thus, most screen readers have trouble working with programs that use this GUI, at least out of the box.  Someone on the Windows side was able to get some QT applications working through use of a Window-Eyes script.  I’ll be talking more about scripting as it relates to screen readers in a future post, since I think the subject could actually be quite relevant to this project.  This script essentially makes use of Microsoft Active Accessibility to make all of the controls readable when reviewing them with the keyboard.  I’m not sure if there is anything equivalent to MSAA on the mac.  If there is, getting these types of programs to work on the mac would be a great project.  In the mean time, looks like I will be looking into Fusion for my multi-platform needs.

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