Question

Is there a way to tell the windows accessibility framework to stop saying whatever it is currently trying to say? Not disabling the feature all together, just stopping the current reading?

Thanks,

-Andrew

Answer 1

My understanding is that the windows accessibility framework is accessed by screen reading programs such as Jaws for Windows and NVDA. It does not do any speech output on its own. In this case it’s up to the screen reader to provide a way to stop speech temporarily; all the ones I’ve used allow speech to be stopped by hitting the control key. Based on the title of your question it sounds like you may be using Narrator, the screen reader built into windows. If you are don’t bother, no screen reader uses it do to the fact that it lacks almost all the features you need to be a productive screen reader user. If you want to support screen reader users go check out http://www.nvda-project.org for a free but quite good screen reader to test with. If you need to stop a screen reader from speaking in your application it’s a symptom of larger issues with your applications accessibility. As a screen reader user I would not use any application that felt it necessary to control my screen reader since it reduces the control I have in how I receive information. Assuming you have a very good reason for this requirement some screen readers support partial programmatic control but this is not well documented or supported. For example see
http://www.freelists.org/post/jawsscripts/Direct-speech-via-JAWS-COM-API,6
Depending on the screen reading software your users will be using another option is scripting assuming the screen reader supports it. This will be external to your program though and require the user to install special files in there screen reader for your application to work correctly. You will have to write custom scripts for each screen reader you want your application to support since none of the major screen readers share a common scripting language.