We are working on accessibility compliance (WCAG/Section 508) for a Clarion 11.0 app (Clarion Template chain) we sell to government clients. Our LIST and DROP controls show up in Inspect.exe as a blank “pane” (UIA_PaneControlTypeId, no name) — the native class is ClaDrop_09560000H, which isn’t a standard Windows control class, so screen readers like NVDA read nothing when they hit it.
Has anyone run into this and found a fix? Specifically:
Does a newer Clarion version/patch add native UIA or MSAA support for these controls?
Has anyone built a custom accessibility wrapper (WM_GETOBJECT / IAccessible) for ClaList/ClaDrop windows they could point me to?
We have ~500 of these controls across the app, so a runtime-level or template-level fix would save us a lot of pain. Any pointers appreciated.
Inspect.exe is showing a dropdown as two window controls.
Other window/control inspector type have pickers so the drop down part is never seen.
I also found the .net WPF framework iirc (one of the .net frameworks at least) also hid all controls and their text using spy/inspector tools so it wasnt possible to extract data from apps.
Best example of this behaviour is using a spy/inspector tool on the new windows settings (gear icon) (old control panel) for win10+.
ControlSpy2 shows you how the standard win32 api controls work with different styles.
The Clarion dropdown list isnt a std win32 api ComboBox or ComboBoxEx control so you’ll need to do a bit more digging to get the data out of the control.
Have you tried a clarion combobox in Inspect.exe to see if it works the same way as a clarion drop down list ie two parts no text to extract or like a std win32 api combobox control?
So firstly, all versions of clarion have the same owner drawn controls.
I set Claude to work on this issue to judge how well it could work with a complex problem. I haven’t got Claude to write the template wrappers around this, but the following solution and code works in narrator for a LIST control, I presume it would be easy to convert to others.
). Shout if you are having any issues compiling.