About
My name is Marco, and I’m working as the Mozilla accessibility
QA since December 3rd, 2007. Before that, I volunteered as a community member for a couple of months.
I was previously with Freedom Scientific, one of the world’s biggest
manufacturers of software and hardware products for the visually
impaired, including the screen reader JAWS for Windows. All in all, I’ve
been in the AT technology industry for 13 years, counting also my
student days where I already started working for the German distributor for JAWS back in the mid-90s.
I am totally blind from birth and have been using screen readers of
various shapes and sizes since 1991, when I got my first DOS-based PC.
As the a11y QA, I’m responsible for testing new features and fixes
in Firefox and other products from Mozilla, but also I’m working
with the community to get people involved in testing all the cool new
features of Firefox 3 and future releases. I won’t limit myself to the
blindness side of things, but hope to be able to help both developers
and users with all kinds of disabilities such as motor impairments, low
vision (although I might need some sighted help on that occasionally)
and others.
I hope this blog will be a good resource for readers on all and any accessibility-related topics. Enjoy the read!
How to contact me
If you’d like to get in contact with me, there are a couple of ways:
- Shoot me an e-mail at marco dot zehe at googlemail dot com
- Find me on Twitter:
- Find me on Xing
- My fotos on Flickr
Hi Marco – I was just doing some research and ran across your blog. I’m hoping you can give me some advice. I have a friend who is blind, and she wants to start a blog about all the things she does when training helper dogs. I want to set it up for her, but I’m hesitant to use WordPress. There are times when it’s totally frustrating to me — so I can imagine it would drive my friend crazy even more!
But it looks like you’re using wordpress here. Is there anything special you’d recommend for her? Any advice or tools I could pass along to her as we get her set up to start blogging?
Please share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks a bunch,
Cynthia
Hi Cynthia,
I didn’t do anything special other than switch the editor when composing blog posts from the WYSIWYG to the HTML editor. WYSIWYG is built on TinyMCE, which is not accessible, the HTML editor is a simple text area. I did this once when writing my first post, and that was it. Nothing fancy.
Greetings Marco,
Just found your blog whilst looking for a daisy player for the iPod/IPhone group.
The article ‘why I wont buy an iPod just yet’ published in early 2008. I was wondering if you have more comments now that 2 years have passed.
I am a vision impaired programmer who is looking to write some stuff for macs and iProducts.
Cheers Colin
Hi Colin,
there is an article titled “My first experience using an accessible touch screen device” published right after the launch of the iPhone 3G S last year in June. I also kept track of some changes that went into iOS 4. See my latest entry on this blog on that topic. My views certainly have changed, and I am an admitted Apple fanboy now.
Look forward to seeing what you are cooking up!