# &VBOX_PRODUCT;

Accessibility Reference

Version &VBOX_VERSION_STRING; &VBOX_VENDOR;

    https://www.virtualbox.org

2016-&VBOX_C_YEAR; &VBOX_VENDOR;

## Introduction

Welcome to the VirtualBox Accessibility Support documentation! This document is primarily a reference to help people who are interested in our project accessibility support and will describe how to use VirtualBox user interface step-by-step. Since whole the application navigation will be explained here, this document will also be helpful for those who are not familiar with our product user interface and wish to learn more. It will be written in a bit excessive manner so that many obvious things will be explained too precisely to make it easier to understand by ear for a blind users. The document will be periodically updated with recent changes and test-cases allowing us to more strictly follow the required guidelines and make our product fully accessible.

Our application is based on Qt5, a powerful cross-platform library which allows to visualize various user interface ideas the most flexible and native way. This also means that the library we use is responsible for many navigation and accessibility aspects (like fonts, size hints, colors, look&feel patterns and many other things), but not for all of them. Nativity as one of the main ideas of the Qt-based application sometimes brings additional complexity because there is always at least one host which uses unique combination of fonts and colors which breaks accessibility support in an unpredictable way.

Independently on platform we are supporting screen-reader applications which can communicate with Qt5 accessibility interface which supports Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA), OS X Accessibility, and the Unix/X11 AT-SPI standard.

Our application user interface is able to be started in two modes:

- First of them is VirtualBox Manager user interface, the main application window which allows to manage and configure virtual machines and their groups. Besides that, this window provides user with access to various global and machine related tools allowing to administrate some of VirtualBox objects and their settings.

- Second application mode is Virtual Machine user interface, which allows to control virtual machine guest screens as separate application windows. Besides that, this interface allows to access some of machine tools and adjust guest screens up to your needs, by changing their resolution and toggling full-screen, seamless and scaled modes.

But first of all we should start from the General Concept which is related to whole the GUI and summarizes the navigation and accessibility aspects we are using for whole application.

## General concept

This chapter describes the general navigation and accessibility concept. We should note that not every detail of this concept is already implemented and not every widget in our project already follows that concept. There is still large work to be done in that regard. But in the end whole the project should correspond to this concept.

In short, every application window of our project should be navigated using the following approaches:

- Mouse Navigation

- Keyboard Navigation

- Screen-reader Navigation

### Mouse Navigation

- Each interactable widget can be focused with mouse (if that is not restricted by underlying host OS).

- Each hovered interactable widget causes own tool-tip to appear.

- Each tool-tip is given either in imperative mood (ex. "Create new virtual machine") or in short form (ex. "New").

- Short tool-tip form is only used if context is obvious for a user.

- Tool-tip can contain shortcut mentioned in parentheses.

- Each hovered menu bar / toolbar action causes own status-tip to appear (if window have status-bar).

- Each status-tip is given in imperative mood only.

- TBD...

### Keyboard Navigation

- Each interactable widget can be focused with keyboard (if that is not restricted by underlying host OS).

- Focusing is possible through tabbing or mnemonic navigation.

- Each button and menu bar / toolbar action can be directly activated with keyboard.

- Activation is possible via shortcut or mnemonic.

- Each shortcut is configurable through application preferences.

- Mnemonic mentioned above is underlined alphanumeric character which is a part of widget label (if widget has label). Mnemonic being triggered in conjunction with the Alt key.

- Each mnemonic is unique within the visible part of current application window, there are no collisions.

- TBD...

### Screen-reader Navigation

- Each interactable widget can be focused with screen-reader cursor.

- Each focused widget have clear name (or full description) in native user language.

- Each button and menu bar / toolbar action can be directly activated through the screen-reader cursor functionality.

- Each complex widget which has children (like list, tree, table and similar) is represented as closed group which encapsulates it's children clearly.

- While navigating user is able to skip any group without forcing to be entered inside.

- Each group child can be a group itself with the same rules as above applicable.

- Each text-field can be directly edited through the screen-reader cursor functionality.

- TBD...