Accessibility workaround

If your application is running on J2SE 1.4.2 or earlier, there is no way to select multiple items in the JFC list box (JList) without using the mouse. In other words this feature is not keyboard accessible.

This problem has been resolved with J2SE 5.0, so it is not necessary to use the workaround when running on this release.

For applications that do not use this feature (only allow one selection at a time) there is not an accessibility problem.

For applications that need to select more than one item a workaround is to use two list boxes and arrow buttons in the middle to indicate the transfer of the selected item from one list box to the other. This is a common feature in Windows applications and avoids the user needing to use a single JList object to select multiple items with only the mouse.

The figure below is an example of this workaround implemented in an application.

The API restriction causing this problem is resolved in J2SE 5.0.