Category Archives: Accessibility

Exposure of audio and video elements to assistive technologies

This blog has been quiet recently due to me being away at the AEGIS forum and workshop near London last week (more on that to come soon), and us preparing everything for the Firefox 3.5 release. If you’re using Firefox … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox | 4 Comments

Last weeks in the “Accessible” module, May 11, 2009

Sorry for being a slacker in updating you guys regularly on what’s been happening! But we’ve been quite busy at getting some stuff finished and hopefully ready for inclusion in 3.5. I already posted about the return of the descriptions … Continue reading

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The descriptions are back!

For those of you following along the Firefox 3.5 development cycle, you may have noticed a regression when dealing with HTML elements that have both screen text and a title attribute, such as the previous link in this sentence. In … Continue reading

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Last week in the “Accessible” module, April 20, 2009

After the Easter holidays, pace has picked up again in the development of accessibility features and other work surrounding our eco system. Actions for sorting and expansion/collapsing After some minor setbacks, David’s patch on exposing actions for ARIA sort and … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, Mozilla | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Extension tip, and feedback appreciated: Feed Sidebar

The extension Feed Sidebar by Christopher Finke is a small extension that allows to view one’s Live Bookmarks in a sidebar, much like one would view history or bookmarks. It is not a new RSS feed management, but instead operates … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Extensions, Firefox | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Article on how to use NVDA and Firefox to test web sites for accessibility

I just published an article on how to use NVDA and Firefox to do website testing. This article can be found on the front page of my blog under the “Pages” section, in the “Articles” sublist. The article is meant … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox, NVDA | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Why are web forums so unpopular with the blindness community?

Last week, David Tenser, Kadir Topal, and I received an e-mail from Dirk, a moderator at www.BLINDzeln.net, a mostly German-speaking community which uses mailing lists exclusively to promote exchange between their members. These mailing lists vary in topics from cooking … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

Updated ARIA-spiced form example to work in IE 8

I updated my simple form example from the third Easy ARIA Tip to also work in IE 8. I had to explicitly state a doc type to put IE out of quirks mode into proper IE 8 mode, and I … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Last week in the “Accessible” module, March 30, 2009

The last week was rather short, but no less busy. First, on the off-code side, I attended the European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt (EAFRA) conference on Friday, March 27. Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! posted a great summary of the event and … Continue reading

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Last week in the “Accessible” module, March 24, 2008

As the accessibility team was at the 2009 CSUN Center on Persons with Disabilities conference last week, not much happened on the forefront that is visible to bug and code watchers. The only changes that landed were: a fix for … Continue reading

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Last week in the “Accessible” module, March 16, 2009

Last week, we focused mostly on some solidification on our code and test framework. We are having some strange problems with tests failing randomly or not being run at all. To that end, I fixed the loading of remote images … Continue reading

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Happy birthday, world wide web!

Today, CERN will celebrate the 20th birthday of the world wide web. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Tim Berners-Lee for writing the initial proposal and sticking to the idea even though his boss, Mike Sendall forgot about … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, General, Mozilla | Tagged , , | 22 Comments

Last week in the “Accessible” module, March 9, 2009

Last week’s work saw quite some code cleanup. Unification of role and finalRole Previously, our nsI*Accessible interfaces exposed both role and finalRole properties. While role returned a preliminary role, finalRole always returned the finally determined role after all markup and … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, Testing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

JQuery UI 1.7 released

The jQuery UI team has released jQuery UI 1.7. Congrats on this release! One thing the team did not mention in the above blog post is the fact that jQuery UI 1.7 is the first version to contain WAI-ARIA enhancements, … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Firefox 3.0.7 fixes screen reader users in GMail!

As you may or may not have read yet, Firefox 3.0.7 was just released. This security and stability update brings a very important fix for all screen reader users wanting to use GMail. Previously, it was not possible to open … Continue reading

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Last week in the “Accessible” module, March 2, 2009

This is the first in an ongoing weekly series where I’ll highlight items that the accessibility team has been working on over the last week. I’ll be reporting on fixed bugs, or will also call out on items that we … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, Mozilla, QA, Testing | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

NVDA 0.6p3 released, quite some news for Mozilla users!

As you may or may not have read, the NVDA team released NVDA 0.6p3 last night. Below, I’d like to highlight those of the changes that are of special interest to those using Mozilla products such as Firefox or Thunderbird … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox, NVDA, Thunderbird | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

What should the action name for an indeterminate checkbox be?

As noted in this blog post, we’re currently working on implementing the accessibility for HTML 5 checkboxes that are indeterminate. An indeterminate checkbox is a checkbox that is neither checked nor unchecked, or half-checked if you will. The first stage … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Implementing a new feature in Gecko that may have an impact on accessibility? Ping the accessibility team and tell them!

This morning, Jeff Walden pinged me on IRC to ask me whether the new indeterminate DOM property for checkboxes that is being introduced in HTML 5 and which recently landed on Mozilla 1.9.2, has any accessibility implications. I did a … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

At FOSDEM 2009

I’ll be at FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend. I’ll be at the Mozilla booth or attending sessions in the dev rooms. If you feel like dropping by and talk accessibility, ARIA and such, feel welcomed!

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