Accessibility on the Mac: Progress report Jan 30, 2012

Marco — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:25:24 +0000

After my blog post about the accessibility of Firefox on Mac OS X ramping up stirred up so much interest (thanks again to everyone who commented!), I thought you’d like to hear a bit about the progress we’ve made since then.

When I wrote the original blog post, what we had was very basic content rendering to VoiceOver or Accessibility Verifier. And I mean really basic. We had just crossed the point where loading a second page, or opening a new tab, would actually tell VoiceOver what content there was. Previously, it would not even take notice of the new content and still show the old stuff. Also, the web area was just now then being announced as “HTML content” by VoiceOver, like in Safari.

Since then Hub:

got headings to be announced.
got tabs to count correctly, and all roles to be spoken.
got dialog texts and other text to speak completely.
got links to be pressable through VoiceOver.

Pretty amazing, eh?

Of course, there are still quite a number of things left to do. To name a few:

As you can see, we still have quite some work ahead of us, and we’ll undoubtedly find more along the way, and with your help once I announce a build that has less known bugs than this above list.

Apple’s iOS 4 supports WAI-ARIA landmarks

Marco — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 07:26:33 +0000

This is, I believe, my 100th post on this blog, and I’m using it to announce that Apple’s iOS 4, released yesterday for the iPhone and iPod Touch, supports WAI-ARIA landmark in the VoiceOver screen reader. VoiceOver has had, since its inception, a feature called the rotor. The rotor allows users to set a particula rweb element by which the one-finger-flick up and down gesture moves in mobile Safari and other apps that use a web display. This feature is now highly customizable. Not only can you enable and disable certain features (for example if you never want to navigate by graphics, you can disable it completely and it won’t show up in the rotor). But the rotor settings also include a new feature called landmarks. This rotor setting is disabled by default, but can be enabled through the Web settings sub window of the VoiceOver settings. Once enabled, and the user switches to it via the rotor gesture, navigating by WAI-ARIA landmarks on a page works very nicely. The one thing that VoiceOver does not do yet is announce the type of landmark, be it banner, main, search, complementary etc. Furthermore, the landmarks also include what is called automatic web spots in the VoiceOver on Snow Leopard for the Mac. So not only do you jump to the actually marked up landmarks, but a few more spots on a page Apple deems interesting. In my experience, these usually are quite useful spots, too, so this doesn’t harm the original landmark feature at all.

It is fantastic to see that WAI-ARIA is getting more and more adoption in mainstream products. VoiceOver is available on any iPhone 3G S and iPhone 4, as well as the newest generation iPod Touch models (32 and 64 GB), and the iPad. The iPad does not include the landmarks feature yet, since its iOS hasn’t been updated to version 4 yet.

Marco's accessibility blog » VoiceOver

Accessibility on the Mac: Progress report Jan 30, 2012

Apple’s iOS 4 supports WAI-ARIA landmarks

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