Firefox Nightly on Android is accessible!

[Eitan Isaacson]

Hi folks.

If you have not heard already, Firefox on Android will be accessible and
awesome. As far as I could tell, this will be Firefox 15.

How do you play with it? Turn on accessibility in your phone settings
and turn on TalkBack or any other screen reader you have installed.
Start Firefox and use the d-pad to navigate around. Use the center d-pad
button to activate the item. You could read more about it here:
http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/05/08/first-round-of-accessibility-support-for-android-in-mobile-firefox/

Yeah, it is not much, but it is the kind of baseline accessibility that
pre-ICS Android provides. We will be adding features and making it more
robust and usable in the future.

Cheers,
Eitan.

[Doug Turner]

This is great Eitan! It is awesome to see us delivering software that many more people can use.

Doug

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[Martijn]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:34 AM, Eitan Isaacson <ei...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Hi folks.
>
> If you have not heard already, Firefox on Android will be accessible and
> awesome. As far as I could tell, this will be Firefox 15.
>
> How do you play with it? Turn on accessibility in your phone settings
> and turn on TalkBack or any other screen reader you have installed.
> Start Firefox and use the d-pad to navigate around. Use the center d-pad
> button to activate the item. You could read more about it here:
> http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/05/08/first-round-of-accessibility-support-for-android-in-mobile-firefox/
>
> Yeah, it is not much, but it is the kind of baseline accessibility that
> pre-ICS Android provides. We will be adding features and making it more
> robust and usable in the future.

Does this mean that accessibility is turned on by default even if
Android hasn't turned it on?
Isn't that a potential performance problem? Iirc, there were some
performance issues when accessibility was turned on in Firefox.

Btw, I tried getting this to work on my Galaxy Nexus and on the Galaxy SII.
On the Galaxy SII it doesn't seem to work at all.
On the Galaxy Nexus, I get to hear some clicking and other weird
sounds when browsing/scrolling, but I don't get to get text to be
spoken.
Is that expected?
What is a d-pad?

Regards,
Martijn

> Cheers,
>  Eitan.
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> dev-platforms-mobile mailing list
> dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile

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[Eitan Isaacson]

Thanks for checking this out!

We have been getting very positive feedback from early adopters in the
Android blind user community. It is very exciting (and scary).

On 05/11/2012 09:13 AM, Martijn wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:34 AM, Eitan Isaacson <ei...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> Hi folks.
>>
>> If you have not heard already, Firefox on Android will be accessible and
>> awesome. As far as I could tell, this will be Firefox 15.
>>
>> How do you play with it? Turn on accessibility in your phone settings
>> and turn on TalkBack or any other screen reader you have installed.
>> Start Firefox and use the d-pad to navigate around. Use the center d-pad
>> button to activate the item. You could read more about it here:
>> http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/05/08/first-round-of-accessibility-support-for-android-in-mobile-firefox/
>>
>> Yeah, it is not much, but it is the kind of baseline accessibility that
>> pre-ICS Android provides. We will be adding features and making it more
>> robust and usable in the future.
>
> Does this mean that accessibility is turned on by default even if
> Android hasn't turned it on?
> Isn't that a potential performance problem? Iirc, there were some
> performance issues when accessibility was turned on in Firefox.
>

I don't believe it is a major performance issue. It also depends what
you mean by "turned on". Accessibility has been linked at build time
almost since we started working on native fennec.

The addition in Nightly is one check during startup to see if Android
accessibility is enabled, if it is, it goes in to special accessibility
mode and sends out platform accessibility events. If it is not enabled
than there should be no extra performance cost since nothing extra is done.

> Btw, I tried getting this to work on my Galaxy Nexus and on the Galaxy SII.
> On the Galaxy SII it doesn't seem to work at all.
> On the Galaxy Nexus, I get to hear some clicking and other weird
> sounds when browsing/scrolling, but I don't get to get text to be
> spoken.
> Is that expected?

The speech is driven by pressing the arrow keys on the dpad.

> What is a d-pad?
>

The d-pad is the directional controller (or trackball) that some devices
have. If the device has a keyboard, the arrow keys could be used as the
d-pad. Since the Galaxy Nexus and GS2 don't have physical keypads, you
need to use the virtual one that is provided with the eyes-free
keyboard, look for it in the store (or read marco's post above). It is a
silly solution, I know but it is what a11y looks like in Android
pre-ICS. ICS phones have more accessibility features, but we don't
support them yet.