I recently spent several days implementing drag & drop in an application. It involved the usual tasks of dragging an object from a library list to a collection in a source list, and then the ability to re-arrange both the objects in the collection and the order of the collections in the source list. Unfortunately, this standard pattern on the Mac isn’t very accessible as it required full use of the mouse, so you need to provide alternatives.

So you want to make your application accessible, but constantly turning on Voiceover and checking through your application to see if it is set up right is getting annoying. What you really need are some tools to help you look at and check your application’s accessibility and tell you where you are going wrong. Apple provides two such tools and in this instalment of his Accessible Mac Martin Pilkington gives a brief overview of them both.

In the second installment of his “Accessible Mac” column Martin Pilkington guides you through making a simple application that has some common accessibility problems more accessible.

Martin Pilkington has set himself a challenge “By the end of 2009, all the apps I produce will be fully accessible”. He has agreed to keep us informed of how its going and the issues he is facing in a new column called The Accessible Mac