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 might appreciate your help on.
Since this is the first issue, and my last update on a concrete new feature/major change has been a while, here’s a broad overview over what we’ve been up to over the past two months or so.
Automated tests on all three active Firefox development branches
Since December 18, 2008, all three Firefox branches that are under development run accessibility mochitests. These branches are:
- Gecko 1.9.0, off which Firefox 3.0.x is being released. These tests actually have been running since roughly the Firefox 3.0.4 timeframe in October.
- Gecko 1.9.1 AKA Firefox 3.1. This is the branch Firefox 3.1 will be released from.
- Mozilla-central. This is the development branch where the next major release after Firefox 3.1 is being developed, with new features going in and more experimental stuff is happening right now.
The most interesting of these is definitely the mozilla-central branch. Both Gecko 1.9.1 and 1.9.0 receive back ports of important features/bug fixes from this branch. The number of tests that run in the accessibility code has surpassed the 2,000 mark two to three weeks ago. We started in December with about 1100 tests.
ARIA 1.0 compliance patches
David has been working on ARIA 1.0 compliance patches and started to put in some good infrastructural stuff as well. Interesting items are:
Alex implemented the ARIA spec’s name from subtree calculation algorithm. Of course, despite all the tests, a regression had to creep in, but after that’s fixed, I believe we’re in good shape. The visible result, especially for authors of ARIA-enabled we bapps, is that the Firefox 3.2a1pre nightlies should now always behave according to spec when calculating the name from those elements/widgets that call for its subtree to be aggregated as its name.
As a side note for those interested in the effect our automated tests now have: When Alex tried to land a fix for bug 463645, it clashed with the above mentioned name from subtree bug in an unexpected way, causing an immediate orange flag on the unittest tinderboxen. We’re looking for a solution to that problem right now. Hadn’t we had these tests in place, it would have taken a while for this regression to creep up in manual testing. This way, due to an immediate backout of the offending code, no nightly build ever saw this happen.
New for text attributes
David implemented the conversion to pt algorithm that IAccessible2 calls for on Windows. This change is also in Firefox 3.1.
Alex implemented a faster way of retrieving text attributes,a nd he and I teamed up on better better test coverage for this area.
Accessible relations improvements
Alex worked on better accessible relations support, allowing for a relation to have multiple targets. This will allow assistive technologies to get at aria-labelledby relations correctly. As a sequel, 1:1 relations between tabs and tabpanels were also implemented, allowing ATs to better identify which tab a tab panel belongs to.
Proper reorder events
Alex, our man for big patches 
, also created a fix for a long-standing bug involving reorder events on DOM mutation changes. Several screen readers need these events to keep track of dynamic changes on web pages to keep their virtual buffers up to date. Some recently inconsistent behavior that often required the user to refresh their virtual buffers manually, should now work much better. This change also is included in the Gecko 1.9.1 branch already, waiting to debut in the upcoming beta 3 of Firefox 3.1.
Thunderbird 3 reading panes
The Thunderbird 3 reading panes received a fix to the way they expose the “from: ” etc. header information. When tabbing through these header fields, one now immediately hears which type of header this is with a compatible screen reader.
This fix was done by Yuen Hoe, a student at the University of Singapore, as part of the NUS Mozilla students project. He picked this bug specifically. Thanks Moofang!
Because this patch relates very closely to SeaMonkey, it was ported there as well, however users can’t take full advantage of this yet in SeaMonkey because of a keyboard navigation issue in the message reading panes.
Better accessibility in SuMo’s live chat
SuMo, Mozilla’s support community, offers a live chat facility that alows users to get help quickly. This live chat was previously not very accessible.
However, Gijs Kruitbosch, the mastermind behind ChatZilla’s accessibility features, worked on a fix, which will see the light in one of the next Sumo updates.
I know this is not strictly the Gecko Accessible module, but nevertheless very important to the over-all Mozilla eco system, and that’s why I’m mentioning it here.
On other fronts
I’m currently working through some of the earliest test files to make them use the common accessibility retrieval and events structures that were implemented more recently. This will help maintainability and make sure that if we add new features to these common functions and classes, every test will benefit from them.
On Windows, all active branches will be more correct in what service IDs they accept when calling the QueryService function. This insures better compatibility with Windows 7, among other things.
Thanks for sticking with me until now! The next reports will be shorter, I promise!
Of course, we welcome your feedback on this kind of post, or on specific areas. So feel free to comment here!