The Mozilla Foundation had a booth at CSUN for the fourth year in a row. David, Alexander Surkov and I were present to man the booth, talk to people, and also participate in a couple of general sessions at the conference to gather information and news, and also to network.

Adobe announces broad range support for IAccessible2

One of the biggest news bangs to come out of the conference is Adobe’s announcement to support the IAccessible2 and WAI-ARIA standards in thenext versions of their Flash and Flex products. Both these standards were heavily driven by, among others, Mozilla, IBM and several assistive technology vendors such as NV Access of the NVDA project. Support for the native GNOME and Mac OS X accessibility APIs is also in the works.

In addition, Adobe announced that they will also include IAccessible2 support in their Acrobat and Reader products.

This means that another big player in the software industry is coming forward and supports these widely recognized standards. It is good to see Adobe getting behind the over-all accessibility efforts and helping to drive adoption in this manner!

Three Firebug-related sessions

Hans Hillen of the Paciello Group had two very successful talks about the UI accessibility support in Firebug. The first was a demo of many of the features, using NVDA as the screen reader to demo them. the second was a use-case talk, where Hans explained in some more technical detail how he went about making the Firebug UI accessible to screen reader users.

Both talks were very well received. The first one had quite a broad audience, while the second audience was smaller, but very focused and involved.

In addition, Jon Gunderson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a talk on the Accessibility Testing Extension for Firebug. But unfortunately, due to my travel schedule, I did not have a chance to visit this talk.

It was good to see two Mozilla grantees doing talks at this year’s CSUN, giving visibility to the many facets of Mozilla’s accessibility strategy.

Newer mobile accessibility technologies marching forward

Apple, RIM and Google, the three vendors of mobile devices with well-defined accessibility APIs, all had well-visited talks at CSUN. In addition, I am aware of at least two talks involving the accessible iPhone and iPod Touch 3rd generation that put these technologies to good use to provide a new generation of assistive software, built on mainstream devices.

Well-visited booth

The Mozilla Foundation booth was well visited on all three days that I helped staff it. Comments and questions ranged from the very flattering “I love Firefox and I love what you guys are doing for accessibility!” to “What’s a browser vendor doing at this conference?”. When we then explained why we attended, many of them were keen on trying out Firefox when they got home or back to thheir hotel rooms.

Also, this conference made quite a number of people aware of other Mozilla products than Firefox. While many had heard about Firefox, they had not heard at all about Thunderbird before. But with the better accessibility in Thunderbird, we can now change this and spread Thunderbird in the accessibility community even more!

I personally had a very moving moment on Friday when a deaf/hard of hearing gentelman and his interpreter stepped up to our booth. He was very interested in what we do for accessibility. Before I knew it, I was talking to him through his interpreter, but wasn’t actually noticing it until well into the conversation. At some point, I mentioned Thunderbird, at which point he started joking about the Ford Thunderbird. David, who was present at this conversation, can probably tell a bit more about this, since this was very visual and I only got a third of what he was actually meaning.

David and Alex also took a lot of pictures, which they’ll hopefully upload and share very soon so you all can get a better picture about what CSUN 2010 was like! Mozilla received a big big chunk of good attention, our funding of other accessibility-related open-source projects such as NVDA, Orca and others, definitely is being recognized in the industry as being exemplary. Also, we got a very nice compliment from a gentleman from the Office of homeland security, who told us that he thought our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is among the best he has encountered so far.

One big failure is there, though

One big problem, which I think should not go unmentioned, is the lack of good internet connectivity in the exhibition hall. For a 2010 information technology conference, having no useable WIFI connection down in the exhibition hall at all is simply unacceptable. The internet connections that were offered were hideously priced, almost like in the mid 1990s when internet connectivity was still not as common as today. Up in the session rooms, the situation was a bit better, at least there were hotspots one could use most of the time.

For next year, one thing I’d like to see is a well thought-through strategy for free wireless internet connectivity throughout all conference locations. A technology conference lives and breathes with the buzz people can create around it by tweeting, uploading pictures etc. People with disabilities are no exception, and instead of roadblocking it, the responsible powers at CSUN should embrace this trend and encourage people to get the word out as easily and hazzle-free as possible!

In summary

I can only say that it was worthwhile going to CSUN yet again, and I am hoping we’ll have a chance to participate next year as well!

WAI-ARIA landmark support

When in virtual buffers, D and Shift+D can be used to skip between WAI-ARIA landmarks. Landmarks are also announced while reading a web page. The new Elements List also has a section for landmarks. Even the possible nesting of landmarks is announced.

WAI-ARIA Drag And Drop support

NVDA now supports WAI-ARIA Drag and Drop, with some help from Firefox 3.6 and later.

More features

• Sounds can now indicate the switching on and off of Focus Mode. Sounds are the default setting, but you can switch back to using indication via speech.
• N and Shift+N can be used to skip past blocks of links to the next/previous block of non-link text.
• On pages that take longer than 1 second to load, you can interact with your system while the page is being rendered. NVDA will tell you that it is processing the page, and it will no longer block the system while doing so.

Also, the Flash and Java interaction model discussed in an earlier post are included in this beta.

For more new feature information, I suggest studying the What’s new document and try out the beta for yourself!

Traditionally, Adobe Flash content is being rendered into the virtual buffer in Windows screen readers such as JAWS. Over the years, this has proven to cause several issues:

• Dynamic content frequently updating causes the virtual buffer to either get out of date, or to update so frequently that reading the content is close to impossible.
• Accessing content can be cumbersome if Forms Mode or similar concepts are not properly handled.

For these and other reasons, the WebAIM screen reader survey taken last year ranked Flash as the technology posing the most accessibility obstacles on the web for blind users. 71% of all participants found Flash to be difficult or extremely difficult to use. Inaccessible Flash applets, which take up the vast majority of Flash content out in the wild, are doing the rest to strengthen this view.

With Java applets, things get even more complicated. For one, one has to install the Java Access Bridge from Sun Microsystems, to get Java to be accessible at all, inside the browser and elsewhere. Once that hurdle is taken, Java applet content is not rendered inside the virtual buffer, but is present somewhere within the browser window, and one usually has to try to tab to it and get focus to it that way, outside the context of the virtual buffer. Accessible Java applets are very rare and currently hardly play any role when considering accessibility on the web. If at all, they’re viewed as obstacles and something to be avoided.

However, this could change with the approach the NV Access team is taking. In their latest snapshot build, they are introducing an interaction model that is remotely similar to what blind Mac users have come to know and appreciate from Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader. What you do is this:

1. You load a web page that contains Flash content. For example, take any YouTube video.
2. You navigate to a spot that says “embedded object clickable” with the normal virtual buffer navigation methods. For easiest access, NVDA provides the quick navigation key o to get to embedded objects.
3. Press Enter.
4. What this does is zoom in on the embedded Flash object and give it focus. Now, use Tab and Shift+Tab to navigate around the Flash app. Other keys such as the arrow keys also will perform differently now, for example left and right will scrub through the video on YouTube.
5. When done, press NVDA+Space to leave the embedded object and zoom out, returning to the parent web page. Your virtual buffer navigation will now function the same way as it did before you zoomed in on the Flash.

One note of caution: I fell into the trap that I thought the content would be rendered in the virtual buffer, as is traditionally done with Windows screen readers. To be honest, I didn’t read the note on this feature before I played with it. But if you don’t tab after pressing Enter, you will immediately leave the embedded object and continue navigating with the virtual cursor. This is because Flash does not focus any particular object inside the applet by default when the applet itself gains focus.

When I tried this on YouTube earlier, I had the feeling I had never seen so many details of the YouTube player before!

One more thing: The above technique will work in Firefox 3.5.x and the latest Minefield nightly builds, and it will also work in the 3.6b1 that’ll be available some time soon, but is not going to work in the 3.6alpha release we issued beginning of September, due to a regression that only recently got fixed in the 3.6 codebase.

With this new, in my opinion more user-friendly approach to accessing Flash content and Java applets, making sure your Flash or Java applets are accessible is becoming even more important than it already is, since blind users will be able to interact with applets more seamlessly than before.

And while we’re at it, the better support in NVDA for Flash should also be an incentive to Adobe to make Flash accessible on other platforms such as Linux and Mac. For the Mac, maccessibility.net have a petition to Adobe for making Flash accessible on the Mac. If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to show your support by signing that petition!

Exposing HTML 5 audio and video elements

The initial exposure for the HTML5 audio and video elements to screen readers landed, causing a minor regression that was quickly fixed. In testing this with NVDA, I found that the button labels weren’t properly exposed and that the slider values were not really useful. The progress meters were showing the number of bytes downloaded, or the milliseconds elapsed instead of useful percentage values. Along those lines, Alex also added a bug to expose proper names for each progress meter, so a screen reader user knows which slider is for what purpose.

Except for the last patch, all others have landed on mozilla-central and will be available for testing starting with the 11th of May nightly build.

To make it clear: This is for those HTML5 audio and video elements that have the controls attribute set, indicating that the internally available controls should be used. Other forms of controlling the media playback, such as from external HTML controls/widgets, already worked in the past since these were not part of the actual audio or video element itself.

Tree view item rectangle exposure

We received a report that in Thunderbird 3 beta on Windows, the rectangles for tree view items were not exposed correctly. The rectangle was too small, not encompassing the whole item. Alex investigated this and fixed the bug, putting an optimization in as a second step for all platforms. This also landed on mozilla-1.9.1 after having baked on mozilla-central for a while, and is available since the May 9th nightly builds of Shiretoko, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

The ARIA live region background tab leakage

David has been taking different stabs at bug 444644, with some good results thanks to feedback from Roc and BZ during the Mozilla all-hands week. However, we’re still fighting a situation where the creation of virtual buffers by NVDA is causing the live region updates from background tabs to be spoken again. Investigation is ongoing

Other ARIA-related triage

David’s also been a busy bee clearing out some ARIA-related bugs, gathering feedback here and there, closing others as they’ve been solved by other bugs, etc.

Firebug accessibility

This is not strictly inside the “Accessible” module of the platform, but very closely related to the Mozilla eco system. Accessibility of the Firebug UI has been shaping up very nicely over recent weeks. I spent a fair amount of time last week pounding the different alpha releases to help make sure things stayed in shape.

On Friday, Hans from the Paciello Group, Jamie from the NVDA team and I also managed to get the biggest outstanding problem solved in a very productive meeting on IRC, and that’s the reading of the Firebug JS panel by NVDA. Watch this space for a review once Firebug 1.4 goes to beta!

That’s it for this week, thanks for the read!

This article can be found on the front page of my blog under the “Pages” section, in the “Articles” sublist.

The article is meant as an introduction, not as a replacement for the NVDA user guide, and it is certainly not meant to replace other accessibility testing tools you might use for your website testing, just as an additional tool to help you get a feel for how blind users interact with your web sites or web applications.

I plan to update the article periodically as new versions of NVDA become available, features are added and other info relevant to the article might change.

Enjoy the read, and feel free to leave feedback!

Support for text attributes and spell checking

NVDA takes advantage of the new text attribute and spell checking support of Gecko 1.9.1, which will enable exposure of the inline spelling features of Firefox 3.1 and Thunderbird 3.

• NVDA+F will report things such as font, point size, styles such as bold etc.
• When reading through text character by character or word by word, if a spelling mistake is encountered, NVDA will announce it, and also where it ends.

This feature will not work with Firefox 3.0.x, as the version of the Gecko platform used with this version of Firefox does not have accessibility information for text attributes and spell checking.

Automatic switching of focus mode

When browsing web pages in Firefox, certain controls such as textboxes, comboboxes etc. can now automatically cause NVDA to switch to focus mode without the user having to press Enter. Escape or NVDA+SpaceBar can be used to turn focus mode off and browse mode back on. Interacting with forms is much more seamless this way, so I recommend everyone to try out this new mode! You can configure it through the Virtual Buffers preferences dialog.

Better reading of the notification bar

Firefox, and to a lesser extent Thunderbird, make use of the notification bar to convey information without interrupting the user’s flow of work. NVDA 0.6p3 has improved the way it reads these important yet unobtrusive notifications by suppressing double-speaking, and other tidying up of the whole process.

Use NVDA to explore the accessible hierarchy of your web pages

From the What’s New document:

* new: In virtual buffers, the review cursor now reviews the text of the buffer, rather than just the internal text of the navigator object (which is often not useful to the user). This means that you can navigate the virtual buffer hierarchically using object navigation and the review cursor will move to that point in the buffer.

This means that the navigator commands (NVDA+NumPad8, NVDA+NumPad2, etc.) will work inside the virtual buffer of a web page, take the review cursor with them as you go, and allow you to bisect your page accessible node for accessible node, in case you wonder why your users complain about accessibility issues.

This makes NVDA not only suited for blind users relying on access to the Windows operating system and its applications, but also for web developers who need (or want) to get a feel for what their web page or application appears like to a blind visitor.

Miscelanious fixes

The below is a small collection of other notable changes that don’t warrant an own section.

• fix: Fix the issue where tabbing to a checked checkbox in a Mozilla Gecko virtual buffer and pressing space would not announce that the checkbox was being unchecked.
• fix: Correctly report partially checked checkboxes in Mozilla applications.
• fix: When reading with the mouse, text in Mozilla Gecko edit fields should now be read.

In Summary

If you run the beta or nightly builds of both Firefox 3.1 and Thunderbird 3.0 AKA Shredder, you should be able to take advantage of all the new features in NVDA 0.6p3. If you use Firefox 3.0.x, you’ll be missing out on the new spell checking and formatting feature, and if you still use Thunderbird 2, most of the good support for Gecko 1.9 and above will not be available to you since that version of Gecko doesn’t work well with NVDA any more.

Go get it, and give it a whirl!