I had previously written on how you can retrieve the text under the cursor, and you may have noticed that it produces mixed results. It works great with some programs but not with others.

It depends on the program in question. Some programs were written with greater attention to supporting screen readers than others. Internet Explorer, for example, has excellent support for ActiveAccessibility because browsing the web is a great way for people with disabilities to get involved in the world around them.

Other programs don’t do quite as good a job. For example, the program we developed to demonstrate various scrollbar techniques does not handle the WM_GETOBJECT message and is not accessible.

So whether ActiveAccessibility works for any particular program depends heavily on how much the author of that program had accessibility in mind when they wrote it.

[Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.]