Home

Welcome to the UIAutomation wiki!

Short intro for UIAutomation

UIAutomation is a Microsoft accessibility framework that allows interacting with user-accessible elements (clicking buttons, sending text etc) in a programmatic way. It is the successor to the Acc/MSAA framework. For more detailed information, check out Microsofts documentation for UIA.

How it works

1. Using an inspect tool (the provided UIAViewer, UIATreeInspector, Accessibility Insights, or inspect.exe), inspect your element of interest: a button you want to click, checkbox you want to check etc
2. In the inspect tool find a characteristic of the element that you can use to identify it from other elements: this might be a Name, AutomationId, or something else
3. Get a starting point element: root element (desktop), window element etc
4. Use one of the Find methods in combination with the unique characteristic(s) to get your element of interest from the starting point element
5. Now you can get information about the element, or interact with it using Patterns

Continue on in this Wiki to find more about UIAutomation tree, elements, patterns, and more.