Mozilla posted a blog entry on this a while back. The URL is here:
http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/firefox-and-os-xs-voiceover-reading-the-magic-8-ball/
My take:
Basically, there seems to be a conflict between Mozilla and Apple--
Mozilla claim the Apple APIs don't do what they need it to do, Apple
claiming that yes they do and that they won't alter them for the sake
of Mozilla or anyone else. At least, this is my understanding of what
the post said, this is what I got out of it when I read it. To be
honest, the Mozilla folks came off a bit standoffish about the whole
thing, basically saying that Apple needs to make Voiceover open source
in order for them to implement their needed changes. It sounds to me
like Mozilla basically wants things their way or the highway, and
Apple isn't having any of that. There's probably blame on both sides,
but Mozilla came off the worse in my opinion. They got their way with
the Windows screen readers and Orca, the screen readers accomodated
Mozilla. Apple just isn't willing to change their accessibility API
and give Mozilla what they want, and Mozilla is ticked off about it.
Apple doesn't usually compromise. Neither, apparently, does Mozilla,
so the whole situation seems to be at an impass.
What, exactly, it is Mozilla wants to do wasn't brought up, just that
they weren't able to do it or at least, weren't able to do it on their
terms.
Again, this was my interpretation of the blog post. Yours may differ,
and if anyone from Mozilla's accessibility team is monitoring this
list, now's the time to speak up.
On Dec 27, 2008, at 19:23, Chris Gilland wrote:
I wonder what the deal is, why the firefox development make it so
accessible on windows, and on Linux, but they apparently seem to be
way behind on the Mac side of it. Is this really them to blame, or
is there a reason for this?
Chris.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jacob Schmude" <[email protected]
>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS
X by theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 6:40 PM
Subject: Re: Webvisum invitation
FireVox doesn't help enough with this. Though web pages speak, to
a very limited extent with it, none of the webvisum menus or
dialogs do. When you need the captcha solving abilities of
webvisum it's best, for now, to use either a UNIX or Windows VM to
do it. FireVox can barely handle the most basic of pages, and
chokes completely on even moderately complex ones.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
get at or repair.
--Douglas Adams
