New accessibility features added in Firefox 3
Many new features have been added in Firefox 3 so that you enjoy browsing the internet without any problem
Support for Iacessible2 on Windows: Now the Gecko 1.9 platform supports Iacessible2, which is an extension to the Microsoft's Activity Accessibility thus allowing more attributes and components to be exposed to the assistive technologies. Once the screen readers and any other assistive technologies begin using Iaccessible2, following will be possible.
It will allow developing text editing support in screen readers. All the content will be made available with color, font and attribute information that include “underline”, “bold”, “misspellings”.
It will allow to access ARIA region once the screen readers supports them. Live regions of web applications are areas that can now announce themselves to the assistive technologies in many “polite ways from restrictive and polite to very intrusive. This will allow desktop like usage of various web applications. An instance can be seen using the Google Reader with Fire Von screen reading extension.
It will allow full accessibility to Windows screen readers that do not hook into the display drivers. That means Firefox browser can be utilized fully by screen readers, which run from CD-ROM or USB thumb drive and are also intertwined with OS any further
It will allow alternative input software that includes Dragon Naturally Speaking in order to implement all their baseline features like “select what you say”.
Support for AT-SPI/ATK on Linux: Now Gecko 1.9 supports Gnome Accessibility Assistive/Toolkit technology (AT) service provider interface. This will enable the next version of Firefox, Sunbird, and Thunderbird to be accessible on Gnome Desktop. Screen readers like Orca or the alternative input software such as Jambu can use Firefox browser to give access to more users. However, any web application like Songbird media player will have accessibility on Linux, once project is moved to Mozilla/ Gecko 1.9 platform. If the developers follow XUL guidelines then accessibility is available instantaneously.
Improved support for ARIA recommendation: The full form of ARIA is Accessible rich internet application is now moving forward and will become a W3C standard in coming years. Its not yet at the recommendation candidate level. With ARIA, the web application developers will be able to develop visually rich and appealing internet application and will be accessible with minimum extra markup. Dojo Toolkit 1.0 is a collection of JavaScript widgets and also supports ARIA. It is thus accessible fully with Firefox 3.
Full Zoom feature with images: The Firefox page zoom feature has been enhanced to zoom images.
Report a broken website tool has now an accessibility option: If you want to use this tool, you have to access the Help menu. The tool is now enhanced and it can report a website if it is not accessible. A website that not accessible is a website that does not provide proper zooming feature and does not display alternative text for the images.
Reporting the sites through “Report broken website” tool can help developers of such web pages to evaluate number of users in need visit their websites and are faced with disadvantages due to inaccessibility. This will give authors the much needed data to again launch their website that can be accessed by everyone.
Large number of bug fixes: Many bug fixes have been made to make Firefox 3. This will definitely give you a unique browsing experience. The experience will far better than Firefox 2. Problems like missing or inconsistent web pages, issues with web pages containing frame sets have been resolved.
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