[Irl-dean] Firefox and JAWS

[Joshue O Connor]

Hi All,

I have came across a couple of interesting things regarding Firefox and 
JAWS - so I thought I'd share.

http://www-306.ibm.com/able/news/firefox.html

IBM is contributing Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) 
accessibility technology to the upcoming Firefox Version 1.5. So what 
does that mean?? It looks like IBM has built some important features 
into Firefox, including support for Microsoft Active Accessibility, 
Microsoft's accessibility API standard for Windows. This will allow 
Firefox to work with screen readers such as GW Micro's Window-Eyes and 
Freedom Scientific's JAWS.

At the moment Firefox and JAWS are not great together - You can however 
download and install a  script from the University of Texas (its easy to 
install)

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/s2s/latest/jaws1/archive/README-phase2.txt

This will allow you to use these commands:

-Read the current section: Insert + DownArrow
-Read the next section: Insert + PageDown
-Read the previous section: Insert + PageUp

But there are limited features supported so that's about it, you cannot 
browse by headings, extract links etc and there is no support for alt 
text or table recognition.

This new addition from IBM looks promising and I am going to test the 
beta this afternoon, point your browser to

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

to give it a go.

All the best

Joshue O Connor

Web Accessibility Consultant

**Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT)* *
National Council for the Blind of Ireland

joshue.oconnor at ncbi.ie +353 1 8821915