It is the morning of 17 November amd I have just switched my computer on. The first thing that happened was that Firefox upgraded to 3.0.4. At first it looked just like another security update but on closer inspection I discovered a new item on the menu. The menu now includes an accessibility drop down.
I'm still getting my mind around this but it is definitely worth having a look at. For example you can now get a list of all headings on the page and jumped straight to a particular heading. This is something that screen reader users have been able to do for a long time. However this feature was not available for people who have limited use of the keyboard; they just had to scroll down until they found the right heading. Now they can go directly to the right heading and skip immediately to a relevant link or input field.
Just to give a flavour here is the list of items on the accessibility menu:
- Reports - provides an accessibility check on the current page.
- Navigation - lets you navigate to headings as described above and most other object types.
- Text equivalent - includes the ability to hide all images.
- Scripting - includes a variety of ARIA and event options.
- Style - allows users styles and provides standard high contrast options.
- Validators - gives immediate access to the W3C HTML Validator and similar tools.
- Tools - gives access to a variety of automated accessibility testing tools.
- Keyboard - appears to enable users the option of adding extra shortcut keys.
The accessibility menu adds to other accessibility improvements which came in 3.0 including:
- Support of IAccessible2 on Windows.
- Support of ATK/AT-SPI on Linux.
- Improved support of the ARIA recommendation.
- Full Zoom with images.
- The 'Report a broken website tool' now has an Accessibility option, so if you find a problem you can immediately report it.
All of this makes a significant improvement to accessibility of Firefox. My only complaint is that some of the help for these new functions is either missing or of limited value. As I discover more I will write another post.
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18th November 2008: 'Carlos' said:
Hi Peter, I'm afraid that your are confusing things in some way. There are not such accessibility improvements in Firefox 3.0.4, as you can see in the release notes. What you are describing is the Firefox Accessibility Extension (not related with mozilla) [http://firefox.cita.uiuc.edu/]. So, I suspect you have the extension installed and it got activated with your last Firefox upadate
Reply to Carlos?
