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Server Guidelines

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For Microsoft Active Accessibility to work as designed, servers must provide accessibility information to clients. Active Accessibility server developers should make their applications more accessible by following the guidelines in the Designed for Windows XP - Optimized for Accessibility logo program.

To implement IAccessible, server developers must follow this basic process.

  1. Create accessible objects by implementing the IAccessible properties and methods for your custom user interface elements and for your application's client. Be sure to provide a dual interface that supports both IAccessible and IDispatch so that clients written in Microsoft Visual Basic and various scripting languages can get information about the objects.
  2. Call NotifyWinEvent to notify clients of changes to your custom user interface elements.
  3. Handle WM_GETOBJECT to provide access to your accessible objects.

For suggestions and guidelines for designing accessible objects, see Developer's Guide for Active Accessibility Servers.