FAQ for Accessibility Insights for Windows

What platforms does Accessibility Insights for Windows support?

Accessibility Insights for Windows is actively tested on and hence supported on Windows versions in Microsoft mainstream support. You can search search product lifecycle to determine whether a specific Windows version is in mainstream support or not. Accessibility Insights for Windows may work in older versions of Windows, but we cannot vouch for its performance on those platforms.

Does Accessibility Insights for Windows work with Chromium or Electron apps?

Accessibility Insights for Windows can be used to analyze Electron and Chromium applications in Windows 1903 update and later because Windows converts IAccessible2 data provided by Chromium into UI Automation data.

However, users must consider that both Chromium and Electron are Web based frameworks. Thus, using Web standards and rules will provide more actionable results.

What type of issues can be found with FastPass in Accessibility Insights for Windows?

FastPass has two steps:

  1. Automated checks: these checks can detect some common accessibility problems, such as missing or invalid properties. However, most accessibility problems can be identified only through manual testing and Automated checks only provide partial coverage to WCAG success criteria.
  2. TabStops: an assisted manual test that helps you find some accessibility issues in keyboard navigation.

Does Accessibility Insights for Windows find framework specific issues?

Accessibility Insights for Windows can detect some framework specific issues. These checks are displayed in a tree grid below the Automated checks. The How to Fix information provides links to additional documentation and actionable guidance.

Can I use Accessibility Insights for Windows on a Windows app written with Java?

If the Java framework produces controls which support Windows UI Automation (UIA) provider interfaces, you can use Accessibility Insights for Windows to scan the Java application. Frameworks known to support UIA are JavaFX and QT (although there may be others). However, if the application is built using a framework that requires the Java Access Bridge for accessibility (such as Swing), Accessibility Insights for Windows will not be able to scan the application.

Sometimes Accessibility Insights for Windows can’t find my application. Is there a fix?

By default, Accessibility Insights for Windows can only scan applications that are not running as administrator. When this happens, there are 3 options:

  1. If possible, run your application without administrative privileges.
  2. Run Accessibility Insights for Windows as administrator (needs to be done for each session).
  3. Enable UIAccess for Accessibility Insights for Windows (will impact all future sessions of Accessibility Insights for Windows). To do this, open an administrative command prompt and run UIAccess.cmd Enable from the directory where Accessibility Insights for Windows is installed.

Does Accessibility Insights for Windows support custom UI Automation properties?

Custom UI Automation properties allow third parties, such as application developers and assistive technology manufacturers, to exchange additional information beyond that permitted by the core UI Automation specification. Accessibility Insights for Windows supports the inspection of user-defined custom UI Automation properties.

To enable custom properties, place a configuration file named CustomUIA.json, following the Axe.Windows custom UIA configuration format, in the %localappdata%\AccessibilityInsights\V1\Configurations directory.