Category Archives: ARIA

From WAI-ARIA to HTML5 and back…or maybe not?

Over the weekend, I gave a presentation at the German Multimediatreff. I talked about how to make things more accessible by combining HTML5 and WAI-ARIA in smart ways, using HTML5 where available and appropriate, and enhancing the user experience where … Continue reading

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Firefox 7 is released, new features in accessibility

Firefox Update 7 has just hit the net, and while it’s still hot, I wanted to share a few items specific to accessibility that are included. First and foremost, we participated in the improvements to memory usage and speed. More … Continue reading

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

Review: The all-new Yahoo! Mail web application

Yahoo! recently announced the availability of their all-new mail web application. They also made announcements on the Yahoo! Access channels about the much improved accessibility of this new mail interface. Well, it’s time to look at it! So shall we? … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Yahoo! | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

What’s new in accessibility in Firefox 6

On Friday May 27, a bigger update was offered to everyone on the Aurora channel that brought them up to a revision 6 Firefox. As this was a bigger update, it is time to also point out the new stuff … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Firefox 4 is here!

Firefox 4 has finally hit the release channels and is available for download immediately! This is a major update that brings a lot of new features and enhancements as well as loads of stability and performance fixes to your browsing … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, Mozilla, QA | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments

New accessibility support for HTML5 elements and attributes

In the nightly builds starting November 9th, 2010, there are some HTML5 elements and attributes newly supported by the accessibility APIs. This will be in Firefox 4.0. Landmark elements mapped to WAI-ARIA landmark roles We are mapping the following HTML5 … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments

New in Accessibility in Firefox 4.0

The below is a preliminary recap of the new features in accessibility for the upcoming release of Firefox 4.0. API support Most of the changes are under-the-hood changes that do not have API changes as a consequence. There is one … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, Mozilla, NVDA, Orca | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Apple’s iOS 4 supports WAI-ARIA landmarks

This is, I believe, my 100th post on this blog, and I’m using it to announce that Apple’s iOS 4, released yesterday for the iPhone and iPod Touch, supports WAI-ARIA landmark in the VoiceOver screen reader. VoiceOver has had, since … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Apple, ARIA | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

CSUN 2010 recap

From March 22 to 27, the 5th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference took place at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego, California. It is most commonly referred to as CSUN 2010. The Mozilla Foundation had … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Apple, ARIA, Firefox, Mobile, Mozilla, NVDA, Orca, Thunderbird | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Easy ARIA Tip #5: aria-expanded and aria-controls

In this Easy ARIA tip, I will give you a bit of a hint on how to make not too complex, but still dynamic, menus accessible. We often encounter menus that pop in and out upon a mouse click or … Continue reading

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Easy ARIA Tip #4: Landmarks

Yes, they’re back! This is the fourth Easy ARIA Tip in a trilogy of Easy ARIA Tips. This week, WebAIM published the results of their second screen reader survey. One of the things to note for me was that not … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA | 20 Comments

NVDA 2009.1 beta, what’s in it for Firefox users?

En route to their 2009.1 final release, the NV Access team has released 2009.1beta1. Here’s a run-down of new features since their 0.6p3 release, of which I did a similar post. This does not cover everything, just the bits that … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, NVDA | 11 Comments

You’re a table, and I don’t care what lies underneath

Over the past couple of weeks, Alex, David and I have been hard at work refactoring, discussing, and implementing better support for accessible tables in Gecko. Some of this has seen the light in Firefox 3.6alpha, but the heart of … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | 16 Comments

Blind web devs, jump on the Firebug train!

Late yesterday, Firebug 1.4 was released. Firebug is the web development and debugging tool for Firefox, with a huge user base worldwide. As JJB mentions in his post, UI accessibility was provided for many of the Firebug features by Hans … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Extensions, Firefox | 17 Comments

The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout

Firefox 3.5 has been released, and now it’s time to take a look at what features of WAI-ARIA are being supported by which Windows screen reader. Competition is healthy in this market, and two new screen readers have started supporting … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, GMail, Yahoo! | 44 Comments

New accessibility features in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 is fast approaching, and it’s time to list all the user-visible changes to the accessibility support in this new version! Support for text attributes, formatting and spell checking Firefox 3.5 exposes text attributes such as bold, underlined, and … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | 34 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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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

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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