AppleScript and Accessibility

I am surprised that this hasn’t been mentioned much on MacScripter, apart from enabling Access For Assistive Devices so that you can manipulate the UI, etc.

I’ve been reading through https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Accessibility/cocoaAXOverview/cocoaAXOverview.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001057-71638 which has left me a little drained, so I’ll start simply

VoiceOver works fine on my application. I’ve ensured that every element has a description, and that works fine. However…

My application window contains two views, one which is an index of where you are ion the process (Think of the window you have on a mac installer: progress on the left, interesting stuff on the right)

VoiceOver, when navigating through the various elements on a page, doesn’t follow the elements in a view: It follows what it thinks is the logical path. This is indicated here:

Because of this, it’s reading all of the progress index, which is both useless and wasteful.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Accessibility/cocoaAXOverview/cocoaAXOverview.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001057-71638

Seems to indicate that you can mark an element as ignorable with

accessibilityIsIgnored

I’m just struggling with how to implement this. If I can use this for the index view, then we are all good.

Ignore this,

I’ve been going down the wrong path. I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to have elements that have no description… If you leave a description blank, it mentions that there is no value, which is not helpful, alas.