Creating accessible software applications with PowerBuilder – PB Docs 2021

PowerBuilder supports the following two technologies of Windows
accessibility and automation — Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) and
Microsoft UI Automation.

MSAA is a legacy technology introduced in Windows 95; it supports
the PowerBuilder standard controls well; but it imposes major limitations
on the PowerBuilder custom controls such as DataWindows. Starting from
PowerBuilder 2019 R3, PowerBuilder supports a newer and more capable
technology which overcomes the limitations of MSAA; this new technology
called Microsoft
UI Automation offers a richer set of properties and extended
interfaces to manipulate not only standard controls but also custom
controls (such as PowerBuilder DataWindows and child controls in
DataWindows).

The support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) and Microsoft
UI Automation is enabled by default. You can disable the support using the
Accessibility option in the PB.INI file:

For example,

It is recommended that you enable (value is 1) or disable (value is
0) both technologies; if you set the value to 2 or 3 (enable only one of
them), some testing tools may not work well with only UIA or MSAA, and may
cause the application to malfunction or crash.