IBM helps Firefox reach disabled

News.com ^ | August 15, 2005, 10:27 AM PDT | Dinesh C. Sharma

[N3WBI3]

IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Web browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big Blue said Monday.

The contribution would allow the addition of dynamic hypertext markup language accessibility technology to version 1.5 of Firefox, the company said. With this technology, Web pages can be magnified, automatically narrated or navigated from a keyboard instead of from a mouse, IBM said. For instance, the amount of tabbing required to navigate a spreadsheet can be minimized for people with mobility disabilities.

In addition, developers can work on "rich Internet applications" tailored for the disabled or elderly. Such applications can run without requiring people to install additional programs on their PCs.

IBM has already helped integrate into Firefox support for Microsoft Active Accessibility, an industry standard for access technologies such as screen readers, which read software and content aloud.

"IBM's commitment to further Firefox's capabilities and reach people who have disabilities marks an important technical advancement for Firefox," Mitchell Baker, Mozilla president, said in a statement.

The market for access technologies is large. Between 750 million and a billion people globally have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or cognitive disabilities, according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S., the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to provide access to electronic and information technology for all employees and citizens, irrespective of their abilities.

[N3WBI3]

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[in hoc signo vinces]

Love that movie...one of my favorites with Clint Eastwood.

/sarcasm.

[LeeHarvey]

> "Web pages can be magnified, automatically narrated or navigated from a keyboard instead of from a mouse"

FYI, Opera has had all these capabilities since version 7.6, as these March, 2004 Press Releases clearly indicate.

[N3WBI3]

There are pluging for FF right now which do similar things but nobody here will say that Opera is not one damn fine browser..

[edcoil]

I dumped Netscape for Firefox because I could not upgrade my OS. I used Firefox years ago and did not like it. The new release seems ok.

[LeeHarvey]

Yep.

I was just concerned that some news agencies would rather report hype than facts (typical, right?). For example, quoting this related article:

"... a distinguished engineer at IBM said the ... accessibility code will make Firefox 1.5 the first browser in the world to add these accessibility functions for visual- and motor-impaired Web surfers."

Being an avid Opera user (since 1999), I found some humor in that text.

Cheers.

[softwarecreator]

I was under the impression the IE had features for the disabled too ... http://www.empowermentzone.com/msie4acc.txt

Maybe they are just different features.

[Golden Eagle]

FYI, Opera has had all these capabilities since version 7.6, as these March, 2004 Press Releases clearly indicate.

While Opera is obviously a far superior browser, these guys are mostly about clones that are given away for free, you'll rarely if ever find them endorsing any proprietary product that carries any sort of cost. Gonna LMAO when Firefox starts charging for their browser too, they recently changed their "foundataion" to a corporation.