Assistive technologies exist to enable people with permanent or temporary disabilities to use the computer. This includes a wide variety of techniques and equipment — voice interfaces, magnifiers, screen readers, closed captioning, keyboard enhancements, and so on. In many countries, including the United States, Australia, Canada, and the European Union, there are laws requiring that programs function smoothly with assistive technologies. For more information, see Sun Microsystems' Accessibility Program - Relevant Laws.

A certain level of accessibility is built-in to all Swing components, but full accessibility can be achieved by following some simple rules. For example, assign tool tips, keyboard alternatives, and textual descriptions for images, wherever possible.

The PasswordStore demo follows the rules set out for accessibility. In the following figure, you can see an example of tool tip text.

PasswordStore With a Tooltip