Accessibility

Accessibility Features in Eclipse

Accessibility features help people with a physical disability, such as restricted mobility or limited vision, or those with special needs to use software products successfully. These are the major accessibility features in Eclipse:

Eclipse uses Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) APIs to render user interface elements accessible to assistive technology.
You can operate all features using the keyboard instead of the mouse. See the related task.
You can use screen-reader software such as Freedom Scientific's JAWS ^TM and a digital speech synthesizer to hear what is displayed on the screen. You can also use voice recognition software, such as IBM ViaVoice ^TM to enter data and to navigate the user interface.
You can magnify what is displayed on your screen in the graphical views.
Any fonts or colors defined by Eclipse can be set using the Window > Preferences dialog. See the related link.

Note: The Accessibility features mentioned in this document apply to the Windows operating system.

Keyboard Shortcuts

All of main menu commands have keyboard shortcuts. A list of these shortcuts can be displayed by using the Help menu and selecting Key Assist..., or by using the shortcut Ctrl + shift + L

Related Pages:

Accessibility Preference Page

The appearance of the caret used in the text editor can be changed by setting preferences on the Accessibility preferences panel. You can access these settings through the Window menu and selecting Preferences... Expand the tree node for general, then Editors, then Text Editors. The Accessibility preference panel is shown here:

Accessibility preference page

The following preferences can be changed:

Option	Description	Default
Use custom caret	This option replaces the original caret with a custom caret and shows a different caret for Overwrite and Insert mode.	On
Enable thick caret	This option replaces the original caret with a more visible, thicker caret.	On
Use characters to show changes on line number bar	Quick Diff shows the changes in a vertical ruler using colors. Color blind persons can enable this option to show the differences with different characters in the line number ruler.	Off

Select Alternate Browser For Help

Pages in the Help system are normally displayed through an internal browser included with Composer. This internal browser can be deselected in which case your default system browser will be used to display Help pages. If your default system browser is speach-enabled (for example, IBM® Home Page reader) this option will allow Help pages to be displayed and spoken. This is a useful configuration option for visually disabled users.

To enable the system browser follow these steps:

Use the Window pull-down menu and select Preferences....
Click on the tree node for Help. The Help preferences window should appear.
Select the option to Use external browser.

Accessibility of Published Configurations

All content in the method library is accessible. Published configurations based on this content will also be accessible with some exceptions noted below. All diagrams and icons have HTML "ALT" attributes, which means they have text-based descriptions that can be recognized and spoken by text-to-speach converters, including speach-enabled web browsers. Obviously there is less information contained in the textual descriptions than in the diagrams, however a reasonable effort has been made to accommodate visually-impared users.

All data tables have row and column titles compatible with speach-enabled web browsers. Tables that are merely used to align page elements (layout tables) do not use row or column headers.

New method content created or imported into Composer may not have the required HTML tags to be compatible with speach-enabled browsers. Authors of new content should use the HTML editing mode in the Rich Text Editor to manually insert appropriate ALT attributes next to "IMG SRC" tags.