Are there any good guides on making WPF applications 508 compliant? For example, does every text input box need to be associated with a label via some tag type like with webpages?
There is this white paper at WindowsClient.net that appears to contain guidelines.
There is also this pdf about accesibility in Infragistics' WPF controls. It may contain some clues, but it is in the context of custom controls rather than entire UIs.
I find Engineering Software for Accessibility portal page very useful, as it covers all aspects of the accessible application development - with a handful of links to MSDN pages.
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I'm looking for a rich text box for a winform application. C#, .net 4.0
I need support for Bold, Underline, bullets and numbering in the text box.
In the future, to add language support with spelling correction is a wish.
I need this to work with ITextSharp for report generation.
I'd appreciate input on which choise of controls that would best suit my needs.
I've previously used on various projects RadControls, Infragistics and iTextSharp but not DevExpress so I can't speak to DevExpress. That being said, for the kinds of rich text editing you are describing, I think you can safely go with any of the 3. If it were up to me, I would go with Infragistics though.
I guess it's a matter of personal preference in this case but I've always found Infragistics to be easier to use than RadControls. I've also found Infragistics' documentation to be better (from the standpoint of ease of locating what I was looking for) than that of RadControls. Both Infragistics and Telerik (RadControls) support teams/communities were very active and helpful whenever I needed help.
Like I said, I can't speak to DevExpress but I would imagine it'll be very comparable to the other two in this context. If you have any specific questions about Infragistics and RadTools, feel free to ask. I'd be happy to answer them.
From your question i was not able to deduce which form of Windows Application are you talking about. Because as you know we can develop windows based application on .NET using Windows Presentation Foundation or traditionally known WinForms development. I cant speak for others but certianly can point you to 2 flavours available from Telerik for Windows Application Development. They are:
RadControls for WinForms - RadRichTextBox:
Features:
Rich Text Formatting - Telerik RadRichTextBox control allows you to
edit text and apply rich formatting options, like:
Bold
Italic
Underline
Strike Through
Text color and background
Bullet and numbered lists
Paragraph alignment and indentation
Show/Hide formatting symbols
Clear Formatting
Superscript and Subscript
Inserting pictures/symbol
SpellChecker - extensible spell checking for different languages,
using built-in or custom dictionaries.
Multi-level Undo/Redo Support - Telerik RadRichTextBox provides
desktop-like usability and control thanks to its multilevel
Undo/Redo feature. It allows past actions to be reviewed and
reversed, just like in Microsoft Word.
Two types of layout – Paged and Flow (as text in an HTML page viewed
in a browser).
Multi-region selection - the built-in multi-region support enables
you to perform various operations for more than one selection
simultaneously.
Import/export - with Telerik RadRichTextBox control you can load
XAML, HTML, RTF, DocX (rich-text) or TXT (plain text) into the
control, you can format and edit it and then export it back to any
of the above formats or PDF.
More information on this can be found at: http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms.aspx
Documentation for RichTextBox for WinForms can be found at: http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/richtextbox-overview.html
RadControls for WPF - RadRichTextBox:
Features:
Rich Text Formatting - Telerik RadRichTextBox control allows you to
edit text and apply rich formatting options, like:
Bold,
Italic
Underline,
Strike Through, Superscript and Subscript
Usage of all available system fonts
Text color and background
Bullet and numbered lists
Paragraph alignment and indentation
Show/Hide formatting symbols
Clear Formatting
Inserting pictures/symbols/hyperlinks/custom UI elements
Table support – including nested tables, merging cells, setting
different RowSpan and ColumnSpan, tables with auto width and more.
ContextMenu - a standard one is provided out of the box, but it can
be easily customized or substituted for a user-defined one.
SelectionMiniToolbar - very similar to the one in MS Word, but can
also be replaced with another.
SpellChecker - extensible spell checking for different languages,
using built-in or custom dictionaries.
Printing – Using the native printing implementation of WPF.
Multi-level Undo/Redo Support - Telerik RadRichTextBox provides
desktop-like usability and control thanks to its multilevel
Undo/Redo feature. It allows past actions to be reviewed and
reversed, just like in Microsoft Word.
Two types of layout – Paged and Flow (as text in an HTML page viewed
in a browser).
Multi-region selection - the built-in multi-region support enables
you to perform various operations for more than one selection
simultaneously.
Rich-text clipboard – allows rich text copy/paste from Word,
OpenOffice etc.; Import/export - with Telerik RadRichTextBox
control you can load XAML, HTML, RTF, DocX (rich-text) or TXT
(plain text) into the control, you can format and edit it and then
export it back to any of the above formats or PDF.
More information can be read at : http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/overview.aspx
Here is the documentation of RichTextBox : http://www.telerik.com/help/wpf/radrichtextbox-overview.html
Hope with above information you are able to visualize the gamut of options our control provides.
Lohith (Tech Evangelist, Telerik India)
I am developing a WPF application that must meet Section 508 (Accessibility) requirements. In general we have the app working with the narrator, but are having issues with the ListView controls where the items are not being announced.
How does one get the ListView items that are populated through data binding at run-time available to the narrator?
I have done much searching on this topic to no avail. Any articles and code samples on this would be greatly appreciated!
There is no way to make WPF more accessible for narrator that I know of. This isn’t a big issue though as almost no one who has to use a Windows screen reader for computer access uses narrator. Narrator is an extremely poor screen reader and there are much better alternatives available. If you have Windows 7 and want to try to test without buying a screen reader you can try testing your application with NVDA This is an open source fairly high quality screen reader. According to This bug report WPF accessibility is flakey. This appears to be to do poor UIA support in XP, if you want to test accessibility you should use Windows 7. If you are serious about 508 compliance and accessibility you should test with Jaws Jaws costs anywhere from $895 to $1095 and the license specifically forbids using the demo for accessibility testing. In spite of this cost if 508 compliance matters you need to buy the program and test with it. Jaws is the standard screen reader used in business and government settings.
I second Jared's answer, you should really be using JAWS or NVDA. For the most part JAWS and NVDA work the same. I often review VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) and other accessibility related information. I cringe when I see Narrator as a method of testing listed.
I'm looking for something like a pdf or anything else that would show a chart of available controls in SL and/or WPF.
Ideally, the chart should have a drawing of the control, some succinct description and the hierarchy if possible.
Has anyone seen such a thing? Freeware or Payware, can even be from a book I could buy.
The following MSDN link lists the controls within the Silverlight SDK:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189048(VS.95).aspx
You can try the sdk controls live following this link:
http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/Silverlight/SampleBrowser/#/?sref=HomePage
The controls within the Silverlight Toolkit can be found here:
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/
Also, there are plenty of third party controls for Silverlight. The following link contains a list to some of them (free or not):
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/28/comprehensive-list-of-silverlight-controls.aspx
The controls that are shipped with the platform are fairly straightforward, so I'm not sure that would even make sense - i.e. the basic buttons, input box, text block, etc.
As for the controls that are shipped with the Toolkit, which is the richer feature set released out of band in relation to the Silverlight trunk, you can preview everything you asked for here:
http://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl4/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
What's more, the source code for the preview is included with the tool kit so it's very easy to see how any of those controls were used.
I am developing a WPF desktop app for a small business. It will have a dashboard with 4 buttons that should show a corresponding window/form.
Examples -
Manage Entries
Admin
Reports
Help
Each of these has a separate form with lots of controls and stuff.
Is it best to have each of these as a separate window (including dashboard) and show them when a button is clicked in the dashboard?
Or is it possible to have just one window with these 4 buttons on top, and swap the contents below depending on the button?
I am kind of new to WPF apps so I don't know whats possible and what is the best-practice.
What you will find with WPF is nearly anything is possible from a UI perspective.
It is definitely possible having one window and swapping the contents below depending on the button. A pattern I like is PRISM which has some interesting patterns and best practices on achieving composite windows in both WPF and Silverlight.
You could also look at the MVVM pattern, which is becoming really popular with WPF. Josh Smith has many great articles for this.
Also, if you are really new, have a look as User Controls, as this allows you to easily modularize certain sections.
What I found with myself was with my first few WPF applications, I approached it from a Winform's mindset - but then after really getting a second look at Binding, these other patterns really began to shine.
One best-practice approach is to use Composite Application Guidance. Basically it is an application design approach which contains a shell and multiple views which are arranged inside it. Microsoft has released a CAG library called Prism through CodePlex, and has provided tutorials and documentation for it on MSDN.
CodePlex Link: Composite WPF and Silverlight
MSDN Link: Composite Client Application Guidance
Our team decided that we need our own custom Rich text box control for Silverlight app we are developing. We looked at existing controls mentioned at A good rich text control for Silverlight
but decided to build our own,due to varios reasons. We are planning to build it in stages, with elementary functionality in 1st stage which mainly includes text formatting. There are very big differences in our team on its estimate, as we don't have prior experience on wpf or silverlight technology.
Can you please help with guesstimates on how long it might take to build such a control, e.g. with the functionality provided by vectorlight or ComponentOne's rich text controls?
EDIT: To make question less vague:)- in 1st stage we plan to mainly add - text editing, styling, formatting, text flow, undo-redo, columns, lists.
A really long time. Building a fully-featured text edit control is one of those things like writing your own build system, that might look simple but is in fact extremely difficult, when you get into internationalization.
It may be quicker to wait and use Silverlight 4 and its Rich Text Control, it supports most of the common Rich Text functions - and supports control hosting so would allow some custom additions it if needed.