IBM Contributes Accessible Firefox 1.5

Currently, Firefox works best with GW Micro’s Window-Eyes 5.5, but works with other popular screen readers as well. JAWS support is quickly catching up as well. Recent articles from AFB’s Access World and NFB’s Voice of the Nation’s Blind revealed that screen reader users faced no problems switching to Firefox from Internet Explorer, especially since both Web browsers had the same keyboard commands. At present, Firefox on Linux boasts the best onscreen keyboard support in the industry via GOK, the Gnome Onscreen Keyboard. Basic screen reader accessibility is available via Gnopernicus or the Fire Vox extension.

With caret and focus tracking features fully enabled in Firefox, users of screen magnification now enjoy a lot of benefits. To enable complete support of advanced ZoomText features such as the Doc Reader and App Reader, Mozilla Corporation is currently reaching out to work with AI Squared.

IBM realized the need to emphasize the use and openness of more powerful Web applications in order to ensure that users can start seeing beyond a typical Web page. Instead of creating their own new Web browser, they decided to team up with the Mozilla community. While Mozilla accepted IBM’s significant contributions, they provided IBM accessibility into this new powerful world of “Web applications.”  For example, IBM has delivered more than 50,000 lines of code to enable accessibility in Firefox on Windows.

A Web application may be an easy-to-use online tax assistant, a Web calendar or a live sports statistics page, that can be operated as easy as any desktop application. Whether the current buzzword for this technology is “DHTML,” “AJAX” or “Web 2.0″ does not really matter. The fact remains that the Web is shedding its looks from a bunch of plain documents to a more interactive appearance. Firefox is currently the only browser to support all the new Web applications available to Web users. Companies such as Yahoo! have announced they are already working on their new interfaces which will support the latest technologies.

Source: IBM, Aaron Leventhal