The new sub menus are a way to more quickly access items in the sub menus of “Dashboard”, “Posts” etc. without having to reload the page with the menus opened. Instead, the menus are opened and closed dynamically by either hovering the mouse over the item that is, by NVDA, announced as “sub menu link”, or by executing a press of the enter key on such an item.

The problem arises from the fact that screen readers on Windows capture the enter key and many others and execute functions based on their functionality inside the virtual documents/browse mode documents. For example pressing enter on a link usually clicks the link.

In this case, a click on a link is not what we want, since that would indeed reload the page. The menu would still be opened, but we’d lose all advantages of the more dynamic, time-saving approach that is made possible in 3.3.

Instead, what we do is the following:

1. Position NVDA’s virtual cursor on the desired sub menu item.
2. Press NVDA-key+F2 to invoke the function to pass the next key press straight through to the application.
3. Press enter.
4. Navigate down with the virtual cursor to find a newly expanded sub menu with links we can click.

Your preferred screen reader offers the same functionality, no doubt. Be aware, however, that some screen readers do not set focus to focusable items under the virtual cursor automatically, so an additional key press before step 2 may be needed to route the system focus or PC cursor to the item the virtual PC cursor is pointing to.

This way, we can easily access the dynamic menus. It requires an extra keystroke, yes, but this is still quicker than having to wait for a page load and looking for the new items starting from the top of the virtual document.

Happy blogging!

First and foremost, the emphasis in this release was on performance and stability. We fixed a number of lingering crashes and inconsistencies on both Windows and Linux that may have impacted some users in Firefox 7. An example of this is inconsistent behavior when printing in Linux and using assistive technologies.

We fixed a bug that would sometimes cause iframe content not to be properly loaded into the virtual buffers of screen readers under Windows.

On Linux, access keys are now included in ATKAction information.

A state change event for elements having the “mixed” state (e. g. a tri-state checkbox) is now fired also for elements that aren’t in focus.

If you decide to opt into sending data to improve Firefox, we’ll be told if you have accessibility instanciated. This is most likely the case when you have a screen reader running, but may also be instanciated by some password entry assistants (like finger print scanners) or some anti-virus software, esp on Windows.

And once again the note that, due to a technical change introduced in Firefox 4.0, you have to make sure to load your screen reader before Firefox or Thunderbird, or virtual buffers may not work correctly. Also if you are one of those people running multiple screen readers, make sure to shut down Firefox and/or Thunderbird before shutting down one screen reader, and loading the other screen reader before restarting Firefox and/or Thunderbird. This is true for Firefox 4 onwards and also includes Firefox and Thunderbird 8.

Happy browsing!

Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) is the best free screen reader solution for Windows and an open source project. It provides feedback via synthetic speech and Braille and enables blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows for no more cost than a sighted person. The NVDA developers work closely with Mozilla to ensure a great user experience with every Firefox release. Over the past few years, the projects have joined forces numerous times to drive new web technologies such as WAI-ARIA forward and into the hands of blind people so these could participate in the open web just like their sighted counterparts.

Its because of this close, ongoing link with NVDA that Mozilla has awarded a $80k grant to NV Access, the non-profit group overseeing NVDA. The grant will enable NVDA to improve the rich text editing and viewing experience as well as make general improvement over the next year.

You can help accessibility for the web by getting involved with the NVDA or Mozilla projects, or even coming on board at Mozilla Co!

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!

This version brings with it a number of accessibility enhancements.

One thing you might have noticed already is that there is now a default language set. Default English blogs should now always cause screen readers that support language switching to use the English variant of their default speech synthesizer.

Also new: Whereever possible, there are now labels properly associated with the corresponding form controls. This means that now also screen readers that do not do their own HTML processing should pick up the labels fine.

One more addition that the WordPress team has embraced is the inclusion of some WAI-ARIA markup. Whenever you comment on my blog now, and soon hopefully many others, and you use a compatible browser such as Firefox 3, and a compatible screen reader such as NVDA or Orca, you’ll hear that the text fields also textually marked as “required” in their labels, now are announced as “required” fields. The WordPress default theme now uses aria-required to denote such fields as required, giving even more accessibility to WordPress!

I’d like to thank the WordPress community to embrace ARIA! It is really amazing that ARIA is now finding its way into such a widespread mainstream piece of software!