Tuesday, October 10 – Thursday, October 12, 2006
The summit was sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation and hosted by IBM in Cambridge, MA.
Aaron Leventhal opened the summit with a presentation on the current state of the Mozilla accessibility “ecosystem”. This included specifics on what is missing and how we can fill in those pieces. He later led a discussion on how Firefox exposes web content and user interface “chrome” via accessibility APIs.
Aaron Leventhal also presented on DHTML Accessibility. He then hosted a lively discussion of the proposed “live region” technique that will allow assistive technologies to be notified of in-page changes in AJAX web applications. Bill Haneman of Sun expressed concern over the semantics of a live region’s “politeness” level (that’s the actual attribute name at the moment). He also suggested a more streamlined markup to indicate which elements on the page are live regions. Aaron agreed to take all of these suggestions back to the WAI working group.
Steve Lee presented his ideas for a cross-platform on-screen keyboard for head pointers and switch users. We talked through several approaches and agreed on a XULRunner/SVG/Python approach. As much as possible, the on-screen display will get out of the way and highlight interface elements on screen. Inspired by the SVG XULRunner clock, The use of SVG will allow it to have a scalable interface that looks good at any resolution. Steve is putting together a Mozilla Foundation grant proposal for further work.
Charles Chen gave a demonstration of Fire Vox, his GPL-licensed Firefox extension that can speak and navigate web pages, and supports both the CSS 3 speech module and MathML markup. Fire Vox works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and is available today. I first saw it at the CSUN conference in March, and since then Charles has been hard at work adding multilingual support. He demonstrated a web page marked up with text in multiple languages, and Fire Vox changed speech engines automatically and spoke each paragraph in its correct language. (The speech engines are licensed separately. Windows users can download two additional voices for no charge.)
Charles is also putting together a Mozilla Foundation grant proposal to integrate “live region” support into Fire Vox, making it the first assistive technology to support the upcoming standard.
Cal Swart of IBM gave a demo of AccessibilityWorks, a program which provides accessibility customizations in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. It can display a larger cursor, override document styles, increase letter spacing and line spacing, speak text as you hover your cursor over a word or paragraph, and much more. AccessibilityWorks is currently a technology preview that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Peter Parente of IBM was also present. Peter is working on LSR, a new open source screenreader for Linux. LSR is unique among screenreaders on any platform because it can manage multiple audio tracks simultaneously. For example, it can announce an incoming instant message in a background window while reading a web page in the foreground, or announce a notification area alert bubble while echoing user input in a terminal window. LSR can mimic the visual space in a 3-dimensional aural space, for instance by making background events sound further away. Peter and Aaron Leventhal have been collaborating for several months to get LSR to work correctly with Firefox 3. Peter has published a 14-minute screencast of LSR (requires Flash).
Shane Anderson and Aaron Andersen of WebAIM were also there. WebAIM has received a Mozilla Foundation grant to write an open source XUL accessibility checker. It will be available as a server-side tool and as a client-side Firefox extension that can fully check installed Firefox extensions and Firefox itself. They will also be updating the XUL Accessibility Guidelines to bring them in line with WCAG 2.0. Shane, Aaron, and I brainstormed for six hours, and we ended up with a list of 119 techniques which their accessibility checker can programmatically test in XUL interfaces.
Håkan Waara received a Mozilla Foundation grant earlier this year to integrate Firefox with VoiceOver, Apple’s accessibility architecture for Mac OS X. Using his private build of Firefox 3, he demonstrated visiting Google and performing a web search. VoiceOver correctly announced the Firefox window on launch, spoke the current page URL in the location bar, and spoke the type and text of links and form controls as he tabbed through the home page and the search results page. Given the dearth of documentation from Apple, this is nothing short of miraculous.
Håkan traveled to the summit from his home country of Sweden with his desktop iMac in a suitcase. We were unable to reach consensus on which of these achievements was more impressive.
Bill Haneman and several other other Sun employees hosted a discussion of Firefox accessibility on Linux/Solaris, informally dubbed “New-ATK“. The consensus was that the way Firefox 3 exposes HTML via ATK is slightly non-standard but acceptable. Specifically, Firefox will continue to use embedded object characters for any non-text child in a text container, and Bill will note the Firefox implementation as an exception case in the ATK documentation. We also agreed on how autocomplete textboxes and combo boxes should be exposed. New states may be added to ATK/AT-SPI in the future to indicate inline vs. dropdown autocompletion.
With this consensus behind us, we are entering the “home stretch” for Firefox 3 accessibility support on Linux; from here on out, it’s just polishing the code and squashing bugs. And speaking of bugs, Will Walker of Sun sat down and hacked out a prototype to walk the Firefox accessibility hierarchy, which exposed several previously unknown issues. All in all, a three-hour discussion led to six new bugs being filed in Bugzilla.
Despite initial hopes going into the summit, no one volunteered to tackle the accessibility of MathML and SVG content. The Mozilla Foundation would be willing to sponsor such work (you know, with cash and stuff) if anyone were interested. Aaron Leventhal also maintains a list of other potential projects that are waiting for the right person to write a grant proposal.
Frank Hecker of the Mozilla Foundation was there on Tuesday. He didn’t give a presentation, but between sessions he engaged with nearly everyone throughout the week. He also treated everyone to dinner and drinks at the Cambridge Brewing Company.
Other attendees:
Miscellaneous anecdotes:
Disclaimer: the Mozilla Foundation paid my expenses to attend this summit.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim