Well maybe this is one of those suggestions that should be sent on to
the VO development team. After all, I suspect a new version of VO
will be out at some point, I doubt Apple will let this just stagnate
what all they have tied up in it.
Scott
On Jan 2, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:
I think I can answer why VoiceOver does not work with Firefox and
why it would be very difficult to get it to work.
VoiceOver works by trapping the title value within a Cocoa
interface. So for example if I have a button control on an
application and I have given the title attribute the value "My
Button" then VoiceOver will read that value. This is how I have
been able to modify some existing Mac applications to be VoiceOver
compatible even without the original source code. I have opened the
application bundles and found the various Cocoa interface elements
and given them title attributes.
Firefox is not a Cococa application it's user interface is done in
an XML language called XUL (see: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/
xul/) Here is an example:
<button label="Normal"/>
<button label="Disabled" disabled="true"/>
This would produce two buttons one named Normal and the other
Disabled. The problem here is that VoiceOver knows only about Cocoa
and not XUL which is used mostly by the Mozilla applications.
The real solution here would be to have VoiceOver be XUL aware in
the same way it is with Cocoa.
Greg Kearney
