As was announced on the Mozilla blog, Firefox 2.0.0.17 and 3.0.2 security updates are now available. In addition to the security fixes, there have been a couple of significant accessibility improvements made to Firefox 3.0.2 that I’d like to give you all a heads-up on.
- Firefox 3.0.2 is now compatible with JAWS 7.10. In an effort to make Firefox accessible to the widest range of users possible, we’ve identified and fixed a problem that prevented Firefox 3.0 and 3.0.1 from working with JAWS 7.10. If you previously tried to use Firefox 3.0.1 with JAWS 7.10, you would get a crash in Firefox almost instantly after launching it.
- Similarly, we’ve identified and fixed a problem that prevented proper interaction between Firefox 3.0.1 and the public beta of JAWS 10. With some elements, if they were made visible dynamically, JAWS would not be able to pick them up correctly.
- Fixes were put in for the doAction and doDefaultAction methods to allow clickables and some other elements like the “Compose” link in GMail to be properly activated by some versions of some screen readers. We previously had a bug that prevented these elements from being activated through the virtual buffers, requiring users to use mouse emulation to activate these elements.
- Elements within a map element that were not images would previously not be rendered to any screen reader by Firefox. This has been fixed.
- A random crash that occurred with some layout tables was fixed.
- And a couple of API fixes were also made to ensure better compatibility with assistive technologies on both Windows and Linux.
I recommend you update to Firefox 3.0.2 as soon as possible to be able to take advantage of these and the other fixes that went into this release. Enjoy!
Tags: Accessibility, Firefox
[...] Oliver | FOSS, UNIX, Linux, BSD, colosseum 2.0, weiche Ware | 24. September 2008 Oder mehr sort of …, denn gemäß der Motto: höher, schneller, weiter sind wir auch aus FOSS-Gefilden bzw. wanna-be-FOSS-Gefilden einiges gewohnt. Realitätsnah ist es für die wenigsten und so klammert man sich natürlich auch gerne an Strohhalme wie in diesem Fall. Läßt man das Foren-foo beiseite und betritt die Mailinglisten so offenbaren sich auch im Falle des FF3 stabilitätstechnische Abgründe. Sicherheitslücken größerer Natur werden gefixt, ein wenig Kosmetika in puncto Webseiten findet man ebenso vor und natürlich die Beseitigung zuvor genannter Unpäßlichkeiten – en detail siehe die Release-Notes oder auch dort. [...]
Marco, were there any specific improvements for Window-Eyes users?
one of the areas that i still see causing problems in firefox is the inability to tab in/out of flash movies in a page (with a plain-vanilla firefox…not sure if a screenreader running on top fixes this somehow). this could be an issue with firefox, adobe’s flash plugin, or a combination of the two, but it would be great if this could be looked at at some point.
[...] The latest version of Firefox 3 also includes a couple of significant accessibility improvements — Firefox 3.0.2 is now compatible with JAWS 7.10 and should also work with the JAWS 10 beta. For more details check out Marco Zehe’s accessibility blog.” [...]
[...] for two Critical bugs and they also fixed “several stability issues.” Firefox 3.0.2 is compatible with the JAWS 7.10 screen reader (Windows only), which is good for people with vision difficulties, [...]
I agree with Patrick in that keyboard users are unable to tab into and out of flash content. In FF the tab skips the content. In IE (7 at least) the tab key enters the Flash object, tabs around it, and then leaves to return to the page. Is this something that people are generally aware of? I’ve read a few discussions about it on the web but not found any conclusions yet.
@Charlie and @Patrick: We are painfully aware of this issue. This issue has been around for a while, and we have an initiative going now to finally get it fixed once and for all in Firefox 3.1. If you’re interested, see Bug 78414 – Application shortcut keys (keyboard commands such as f11, ctrl+t, ctrl+r) fail to operate when plug-in (flash, acrobat, quicktime) has focus and Bug 93149 – No way to move focus between plugin and browser from keyboard
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[...] The latest version of Firefox 3 also includes a couple of significant accessibility improvements — Firefox 3.0.2 is now compatible with JAWS 7.10 and should also work with the JAWS 10 beta. For more details check out Marco Zehe’s accessibility blog. [...]
Nice to see the Jaws interaction bugs fixed! Marco thanks for keeping us updated. I know these point release announcements take time to organize and publish.