There are two new ARIA resources that recently entered the web which I’d like to point you to if you’re interested:
Paciello Group have started an ARIA tutorial.
Peter Thiessen of ATRC in Toronto, Canada, has started a blog on Live Regions.
Cool stuff, guys!
Litmus is Mozilla’s community testing platform that allows anyone to test Firefox or other Mozilla products by running a set of testcases and giving us feedback about whether the test passed or failed. The Mozilla QA team uses these test runs to do basic functionality tests (run before every beta release), full functionality tests (run before releases or release candidates), or other set of tests to ensure that certain areas of the product behave as expected with a given set of steps.
For RC1 and the upcoming RC2, I’ve now created testcases for accessibility areas. These tests should be performed using Firefox on either Windows or Linux, and using a screen reader like NVDA, JAWS, or Window-Eyes on Windows, or Orca on Linux. To sighted people not using a screen reader, these expected results do usually not make much sense since they are especially tailored towards output generated by screen readers for the blind.
If you’re interested in helping out testing Firefox on the accessibility side, go get a Litmus account and run the Firefox 3.0 Accessibility test run.
There are a lot of other test runs to perform if you’re interested. You may have to find keyboard equivalents for certain mouse-driven actions, but that should be no problem if you know your Firefox!
Look forward to your results!
As Firefox 3 is fast approaching, and you extension developers are getting ready to update your products, it is a good time to also give your extensions a thorough accessibility checkup. Can the extension be launched without using a mouse? Are labels properly associated with the controls they are labelling?
To help you out, there are XUL accessibility authoring guidelines available that cover these and other topics extension authors should be aware of. Firefox 3 is much more accessible than previous versions were, also on one additional platform (Linux), so the userbase that may be using your extensions without a mouse and/or with the help of assistive technologies is growing!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve approached a few developers of extensions I use frequently to suggest some accessibility improvements. Here’s a list of extensions who have become more accessible recently:
I’d like to thank these extension authors for being so responsive and willing to make their extensions more accessible to a wider audience! I found that often it was only a missing resource like the above mentioned authoring guidelines that can help make an extension more accessible. So, if you are an extension developer, go check them out!
If you have any questions about ways to make your extension more accessible, feel free to contact me either here on my blog, on the #accessibility channel on IRC, or by sending mail to the mozilla.dev.accessibility newsgroup. I’m sure someone from the growing accessibility community or myself will be able to help you out!
Aaron Leventhal posted a great summary of the impact of Mozilla Accessibility to the mozilla.dev.accessibility newsgroup.
Have anything to add? Any success story to share where the accessibility in Mozilla product had an impact on you? Either comment here on the blog, or go to the thread and reply there!
We want to hear from you!
From May 7 to May 9, I attended the SightCity conference and exhibition of assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired. It is the biggest one in the German speaking world, and one of the biggest venues of this kind in Europe.
Thanks to the help of Jane, Anne-Julie and Mary, we had good posters, a “fat-head” that immediately caught everyone’s eye, and also lots of goodies to give away to people.
But most importantly, we were there to give out the good word on accessibility work for Firefox 3 and the Mozilla 1.9 platform. I was accompanied by Gijs Kruitbosch, who brought accessibility to ChatZilla, Steve Lee, a Mozilla Foundation grantee and father of the Jambu project, and Ben ‘Cerbera’ Millard, community member, accessibility enthusiast and HTML 5 expert, and currently in the process of writing a proposal for a Mozilla grant.
While day 1 and 3 were rather slow going, with some peaks here and there, but also periods where there were quiet moments, the Thursday was really packed. The question we were asked the most was “What is a browser manufacturer doing at an assistive technology exhibition?” Unlike in the United States, where it is common that big players such as Google, Yahoo, Mozilla or Microsoft show up with booths at such conferences like CSUN, this is not common at all in Germany. So we were the new kid on the block, which brought us some good attraction.
Unlike in the U.S., where we were often asked what Mozilla produces, in Germany many people already know what Mozilla or Firefox are, or are actually using it. I’d say that the figures of market share among the blindness community almost match the figures on the over-all user base. Also, there were many who mentioned that they are using Firefox at their work places.
Those who are using Firefox 2 already were very interested in hearing about the new features in accessibility in Firefox 3. Also high in demand were the fact that Firefox is also accessible on Linux, and the fact that NVDA supports it.
On the more personal side, I had a chance to catch up with a number of people from all around the German-speaking world, some of whom I have known for many years.
Ben is preparing a much more detailled blog post on our SightCity experience. I’ll let you all know when it’s finished! Also, my three sighted friends took lots of pictures. If you guys will let me know where they are, I’ll link them here.
Last week on Tuesday, I attended a German web 2.0 accessibility conference titled Einfach für Alle – Konzepte und Zukunftsbilder für ein Barrierefreies Internet, loosely translated “Simply for all – Concepts and Visions for an accessible internet”. The conference was organized by the Aktion Mensch initiative Einfach für alle. I was invited to participate as an expert on Web 2.0 technologies in a workshop titled “web applications – The software inside the browser”.
The workshop consisted of four experts, one moderator, and about 20 participants in the audience. In addition to myself, there was one other blind expert, Anna Courtpozanis of WEB for All, one web designer (Martin Kliehm of Namics AG Germany, and Dr. Carlos Velasco of the Fraunhofer Institut für angewandte Informationstechnik, and head of the BIKA Web Compliance Center. The workshop was moderated by Jo Bager, journalist and editor at one of the most widely used German computer technology magazines called C’T.
The workshop started out with the introduction of the experts and their statements for the workshop. Both Dr. Valesco and I put a strong emphasis on ARIA, both getting the point across that ARIA is the way to make Web applications accessible today and in the future.
Mrs. Courtpozanis emphasized that screen reader vendors and browser manufacturers should work more closely to ensure better accessibility for web applications, a point I definitely agree with! She also was of the opinion that accessibility in web applications becoming the common thing rather than the exception, is 10 years away still. I honestly hope that we can reach out to web developers and make this happen sooner!
Mr. Kliehm’s statements were all around sharing innovation and thus infusing progress, that this progress is going to be a community process, and that the W3C will be the over-all infrastructural framework for this progress to happen. As examples, he mentioned Yahoo and Google sharing their applications with everyone, therefore driving the web forward. I also see us at Mozilla in this context: We’re sharing the innovation with everyone, making it accessible and driving adoption through standards workgroups. Needless to say that this is definitely a community process! And yes, the W3C is the organization through which we also drive the standardization effort for ARIA, for example.
After we had finished our statements, the workshop discussion quickly turned into a Q & A session between mostly the web developer audience and the experts. There were many questions regarding interaction with screen readers, quite a number of questions surrounding ARIA (some of the web devs hadn’t even heard about it yet), and the state of support for these new technologies in Firefox and other browsers. We could help the audience understand some of the concepts ARIA is based on. We could also show them how they can use NVDA or Orca to test their sites for accessibility using Firefox 3.
Mrs. Courtpozanis and I also gave examples of web 2.0 applications that we can use, and also those we cannot yet use. One that we both use is GMail, one we both cannot access is Google Docs. Incidentally, the note taking took place in Google Docs on the Eee PC that the moderator had brought along.
In the end, we mutually agreed that the key is to teach and advertise the technologies to make web applications accessible in seminars, at conferences, through blogs and other means to raise the awareness among all web developers, not just those that already are sensitive to accessibility needs.
It was a good workshop, although it did have a Q & A session characteristic over periods of time, seeming more like web devs finally having a chance to ask the screen reader users all the questions they hadn’t had a chance to ask before. But the moderator managed to always keep us in check and not detour too much. 
I also visited a second workshop on that day, titled “Accessibility and Mobility”. The goal was to try and see how accessibility on the web 2.0 can also help mobility. The only expert was Mr. Jochen Hahnen, staff member of the competence center Kooperationssysteme des Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik. He brought with him an application consisting of both a web portal and a mobile phone software that allow joggers or bicyclers to record a certain route they regularly take for trasining, and then upload that recording to the portal. That way, they can compare themselves to others using the same track, or see how their fitness develops over time. Incidentally, the web portal and mobile phone software were both not accessible, even though the usefulness for e. g. blind people or wheelchairers is imminently clear: This product could be used to upload good routes to use for wheelchairers, or information like a moving construction work facility for blind walkers. Mr. Hahnen clearly stated that this software is currently designed specifically for sportives, but could be further developed to also be a portal for visually impaired or wheelchair users.
The way this workshop was done leaves me with a bit of a mixed feeling. On the moderator’s side, there was nothing to complain about. He made the best of the situation. However, the expert invited for this workshop, or the product chosen to showcase, was off the mark. It has remained unclear whether the organizers simply didn’t know that the product is currently not accessible, or whether they wanted to give the Fraunhofer Institute an incentive to make it accessible. One thing was clear: Mr. Hahnen could not meet the audience’s expectations, and he was literally pounded on by some participants several times for the application not being accessible.
The over-all framework consisted of both a study conducted by Aktion Mensch on the use of web 2.0 offerings by handicapped people, and the start of the Biene award 2008. The Biene award has been given to German web sites that, in the given year, made a special effort to make their web presence more accessible. It is by now the most recognized award for accessibility in the German-speaking world.
On the inofficial side, I found that many participants already knew one another, and that I was sort of the new kid on the block, only knowing a handful of people from my previous job. In that sense, the conference also had a bit of the atmosphere of a family gathering. And I can say that I was welcomed very warmly into that family. There were several people there who expressed grattitude that Mozilla finally joined them through me.
I’d like to thank the Einfach für Alle team for the invitation! It was an enlightening experience!