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!

I’d like to add a few items that a blind user who uses Firefox 3 with Orca will notice.

Aside from the obvious, the web browsing itself, great attention has been paid to make dialogs such as the Preferences dialog behave like dialogs in other Gnome apps: The Cancel button comes before the OK button while tabbing through the dialog. The dialog itself is found under the Edit menu, as is usual for other Gnome apps, and it’s called “Preferences”, not “Options” like on Windows.

The Location Bar is an AutoComplete, a widget type not found on Windows, but used natively on Linux.

The Places Organizer tree tables are native tree tables, displaying hierarchical information in multi-column view.

As you would expect, the Open File, or any kind of Save As dialogs are the native Gnome dialogs, so if you’re used to using GEdit, OpenOffice etc., you’ll feel right at home, Firefox is not requiring you to learn something new here.

One inconsistency I found–and I’ll have to find out whether a fix for this is planned– is the fact that above mentioned Tree Tables cannot be navigated like, for example, in Nautilus: In Nautilus, you expand a collapsed item using the + key, and collapse it using the - key. Pressing Right Arrow moves you one column to the right, Left Arrow moves you one column to the left. This does not yet work in Firefox (or Thunderbird, for that matter). There, Right Arrow expands, Left Arrow collapses an expandable node, and moving between columns isn’t possible at all currently. So this is typical Windows-style still, but within that, consistent across platforms.

All in all, I expect the browsing experience with Firefox 3 on Linux to be a great one. The Orca team is putting hard work into making Orca work well with Firefox, and the past month alone has brought an emense boost in speed, as discussed here.

A big thanks to both developers of the Mozilla accessibility module and the Orca team for working so closely to make these improvements possible! It shows that the open-source model is one that is really there to benefit all users wherever possible.

If you’re interested in trying out these improvements in responsiveness, get the latest nightly build of Firefox 3, install Py-ATSPI and Orca from source, read the notes on installing and using Firefox 3 with Orca, and have fun with this great improvement!

Note note note: Both Firefox nightlies and Orca installed from source arre products currently under development, so you should use them only for testing, but not expose any valuable data to them without a good backup strategy!

Please see also Orca developer Joanmarie Diggs’s announcement to the Orca list, which tells you all the details of the speed improvement.

By the way: This blog post was created using Firefox nightly of December 20, 2007, and latest Orca trunk from early December 21, which has the speed improvements.