As I had mentioned in previous emails, the root issue is a philisophical
one. Good app developers want to write their code once. So when it came
to accessibility the Mozilla folks went to the open standard
IAccessible2 APIs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAccessible2
That way any platform that went with this standard would get
accessibility and any platform "could" implement the standard if they
wanted to. So Windows and Linux did and Mozilla's apps are accessible
there. Apple has implemented their own accessibility API and basically
told Mozilla to re-implement to Apple's standards. Mozilla has refused
saying Apple should just implement IAccessible2. And so here we are with
no accessibility because both sides insist the other needs to do the
work. I can't really blame Mozilla for saying Apple should implement the
open APIs for accessibility. At the same time I'm sure Apple thinks
their APIs are better and Mozilla just needs to get with the program if
they want to join the Apple ecosphere.
Not sure how many of you have actually worked with developers to get
them to do stuff to make their apps accessible but I'd say most just
devs are unaware or it isn't as high a priority as just getting the new
features done. I assume both Apple and Mozilla's engineers are of a
similar bent that they have 50 features to implement with time for only
10 and coming to them with requests to drop more features to work on
accessibility is a tough sell. That said, Mozilla is open source so
anyone who wants to could do the coding. I think IBM funneled some money
to Mozilla to make the IAccessible2 stuff happen and I imagine Apple
could do the same, but probably wont.
CB
On 9/11/11 4:05 PM, Eric Oyen wrote:
I find that rather interesting. now why would the general public (and business
professionals) get the impression that mozilla was the most accessible web
browser for any OS? sure it works well with windoweeyes and jaws in the windows
platform. it also works mostly with orca in linux. it does not work at all in
OS X with voiceover (and I have even tried growl with it and still had a lot of
issues).
I have sent more than a few emails over the last few years and all I get back
is nothing but a load of crapola and finger pointing. now I know we can't
prevail upon a bunch of volunteer code monkeys and still have them do the work.
if they were paid and we wrote the checks, that would certainly be a different
case.
-Eric
On Sep 11, 2011, at 12:43 AM, Rachel magario wrote:
the sad part is that loads of programers think firefox is the most accessible
browser out there. They get shocked to find it does not work on the mac. I
recall a programer at my work insisted that I should use mozilla. Only after he
tried using it with vo by him self, was when the message got across!
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