Category Archives: Firefox

Happy birthday, Firefox!

In case you haven’t noticed already: Today is Firefox’s 5th birthday! On November 9th, 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released to the general public after more than two years of development. And boy, was I jealous! All my sighted friends could … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox | 18 Comments

Firefox 3.5.4 fixes certain comboboxes on Linux with Orca

If you haven’t noticed yet, Firefox 3.5.4 hit the web last night. For accessibility, this brings one major fix all of our Linux and Solaris users will appreciate: Certain comboboxes such as the “Security Question” one on the GMail signup … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox, Orca | 7 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

New approaches to Flash and Java accessibility in the browser on Windows

Mick and Jamie from NV Access, the organization behind the free and open-source NVDA screen reader for Windows, are taking new approaches to accessing accessible Flash and Java applets inside the browser. Traditionally, Adobe Flash content is being rendered into … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox, NVDA | 22 Comments

The current state of accessible Firefox on the Mac, your help is appreciated!

I’ve been asked time and time again about what the current state is of the possibility of an accessible Firefox on the Mac that interacts with the VoiceOver screen reader. Well, let me recap what the current affair is. First … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Apple, Firefox | 20 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

Use CSS3 transforms, makes your pages more accessible!

If you’re one of those types who likes to visually twist, rotate or tweak some text, in previous years the only real choice was to use pictures to achieve such visual effects. However, thanks to CSS3 transforms, supported in Firefox … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, Firefox | 19 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

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

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox, NVDA, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Accessibility, ARIA, Firefox | Tagged | Leave a comment

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