iTunes 8.0 supports the Accessibility API!

September 17th, 2008
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

That means that Language Aid can now grab text from it and perform lookups. It has been a long time coming and it a significant enough change that Steve mentioned it in his keynote at the music event. This is somewhat less significant these days because there are two other ways independent from the Accessibility API that Language Aid has to grab text from applications. However, the fact that iTunes was a first party app made it quite a big omission. To its credit I suspect that this was due to the entire interface being implemented independently of any OS frameworks to allow for easier porting to Windows and higher consistency in behavior between the app on the two platforms.

There are a few major apps that still do not fully support Apple’s Accessibility API fully (Office, Firefox, I am looking at you…) but every little step helps.

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