Freigeben über

Accessibility Issues with WPF Overlay Frame

  • Artikel

Overlay Frames in WPF are sweet and present endless opportunity to innovate on the Application UI. I have seen some neat usage of it with great result. However there are some accessibility issues ( Wherein the ElementFromPoint returned is wrong )with Frame that renders Record and Play Unusable. However if the Frame is used in correct way then Record and Play will work just fine…

If the XAML structure is like

<Grid>
        <Button Content="Button" Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="42,40,0,0" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="75" />
        <Frame Height="100" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="12,0,0,0" Name="frame1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="200" />
</Grid>

then  there is a accessibility issue with the application. If we look at the UI Tree using UISpy and Hover over the Button Control we will see that the element we get at that point is the Frame and not the button. This is clearly wrong as if you send a click it will goto the button.

Incorrect

However things are not bleak and black and there is a easy workaround to get this working. If instead of the XAML structure mentioned above the structure is

<Grid>
        <Frame Height="100" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="12,0,0,0" Name="frame1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="200" />
        <Button Content="Button" Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="42,40,0,0" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="75" />
</Grid>

then the accessibility is absolutely correct. If we look at the UI Tree using UISpy now we get the following

Correct

 

In the above scenario if you try to click on the Button all you will get is click on the FRAME.  So if you encounter such issues in your application you should try and see if the above is the case.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2010
    Hi Ritu, Did you get a solutiuon to this post. I'm having a same issue with my script. I can't access the textblock that is inside a Data Template. Please reply. Thanks, Umair VS 2010 - Coded UI Test : Can't identify a textblock object with Data Template

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2010
    Does we have ability to solve the problem without changing XAML structure?

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2011
    The comment has been removed