XForms Accessibility
Alexander Surkov
I am pleased to announce that the XForms accessibility project is ready
to enter the testing phase. The goal
of the project is to make visual Xforms elements accessible, and to
implement
keyboard navigation consistent with standard controls.
Methodology Used
Implementation of accessible objects for XForms elements is based on top
of the existing object
hierarchy introduced in the Mozilla accessibility module. Keyboard
navigation for
XForms elements is built in accordance with
http://www.mozilla.org/access/toolkit-checklist.
Downloading Accessible XForms-Enabled Builds of Firefox
For Firefox, you may directly download the nighly "trunk" build of
Firefox and install the Xforms extension
which lives in 'xpi' directory of the build. Note, XForms accessibility
is implemented only on trunk.
Trunk builds are not considered stable and should not be installed on
top of the Firefox used for daily browsing.
Currently we have verified that XForms accessibility is working on the
Windows platform, and Linux testing has not yet been done, although
everything should work and is ready to be tested.
Trunk builds of Firefox:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/
Trunk builds of XForms extension (Windows):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/windows-xpi/
Trunk builds of XForms extension (Linux):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/linux-xpi/
Alternatively -- Build It Yourself
If you would like to build firefox/seamonkey yourself then please ensure
your config file has
the following option "ac_add_options
--enable-extensions=default,xforms,schema-validation".
How To Test
There are two approaches to test XForms accessibility. The first is to use
and assistive technology such as a screen reader, or an accessibility
testing tool,
to make sure XForms elements have proper accessible objects. Or
you may be guided by http://www.mozilla.org/access/toolkit-checklist
to check keyboard navigation for XForms controls.
You can try the following link to test XForms accessibility:
1) visual XForms elements in XHTML document
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=251493
2) visual XForms elements in XUL document
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=251497
3) you can see XForms sample tests
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/samples.html
4) there are set of tests at http://beaufour.dk/xftst/
5) W3C's XForms test
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/Test/XForms1.0/Edition2/front_html/XF102edTestSuite.html
Known Problems
1) Some Xforms elements have redundant accessible child elements. For
example,
this is compact xf:select that is accessible itself and contains
accessible object for
html:select. The bug 366450 address this problem.
2) Keyboard navigation issue for datepicker, the bug is 361997
3) Keyboard navigation issue for compact appearance select/select1
controls, the bug is 339827
4) Accesskey support (bug 339287)
If you will catch a problem not presented in the list above then please file
new bug that should block bug 337249 or please contact me directly by
surkov.a...@gmail.com email.
XForms/Accessiblity Resources
1) XForms specification http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/
2) Mozilla XForms project http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/
3) Mozilla accessibility project http://www.mozilla.org/access/
3) UI XForms elements references
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XForms:User_Interface_Elements
4) XForms accessibility reference
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/XForms
Aaron Leventhal
Congratulations and excellent work!
I will also join Alexander's call for community
testing. All feedback welcome.
- Aaron
Aaron Leventhal
build, make sure you grab an installer with
3.0a2pre in the name. The 3.0a1 builds should no
longer be in that directory. Sorry for the confusion.
- Aaron