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NAME

Win32::ActAcc 1.1 - Active Accessibility client in Perl

SYNOPSIS

Win32::ActAcc enables Perl scripts to examine the GUI and monitor WinEvents, as screen readers do.

In this Perl extension, you'll find familiar Active Accessibility functions, along with novelties such as iterators to accommodate laziness and impatience.

For documentation (on the Perl extension, not Active Accessibility itself), run perldoc Win32::ActAcc or view ActAcc.html after installation.

For clicking and typing and such, you may use Win32::GuiTest to complement the view of the GUI you get from Active Accessibility.

INSTALLATION

Building the extension from source code requires Visual C++ 6.0 SP 4 or later, and the "Platform SDK" of July 2000 or later. (The C++ compiler in the ".NET Framework 1.0" SDK will do, but it creates a dependency on a .NET DLL that not everyone has.) The "nmake test" requires English-language Windows 2000 or XP.

Reboot first, to unload any residual inproc WinEvent handlers from a prior version of Win32::ActAcc.

 perl Makefile.PL
 nmake 
 nmake test
 nmake install

nmake test depends on very little outside of Win32::ActAcc itself, and therefore tests very few features.

A more in-depth test, eg\playpen.pl, uses the small C# Windows Forms app in the eg\playpen directory to exercise more features. Even this simple app has been observed to present itself differently to Active Accessibility on computers running different versions of Windows, so your mileage may vary.

CHANGES from version 1.0

You can import specific symbols, or get all of them like this:

 use Win32::ActAcc qw(:all); 

dig allows paths to omit client only by request:

 $Win32::ActAcc::IMPLICIT_CLIENT = 1; # deprecated

The "Start Menu" module is history. Each revision of Windows outsmarted it.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2000-2004, Phill Wolf.

pbwolf@cpan.org