On 14/1/09 23:35, David Hole wrote:
I don't know if this have been up before, so I take the chance and try.
Have anyone of you tried the most of the common web browsers (safari,
firefox and opera)?
Actually, this is a common topic of discussion and debate on this list
and on the macvoicer over list (
http://www.freelists.org/list/macvoiceover ).
You might like to search the archives.
What's the difference between them?
You might like to peruse the features their vendors choose to highlight:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari.html
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/
http://www.opera.com/browser/features/
What gives the best results with VO and so on?
Ultimately, this depends on what you're trying to do and what site
you're trying to do it on. But in general, I'd say Opera, Safari, WebKit
Nightly (the developers' build of Safari), and OmniWeb (another browser
based on the WebKit rendering engine) have passable VoiceOver support,
while Firefox requires a third piece of software to be usable at all.
And I tried FireFox 3, and didn't get nothing out of it...
I just "installed" it, and did nothing more. Should I do something more
to get it work with VO?
You can install the Fire Vox add-on that turns Firefox into a
keyboard-navigable, self-voicing browser, using the same speech engine
as VoiceOver for voice output.
Instructions for installing Fire Vox follow.
Make sure VoiceOver is on throughout.
First download and install the current version of Firefox in your
Applications folder.
Next download the FireVox add-ons bundle:
fetch http://firevox.clcworld.net/clc-4-tts_bundle_v4.0_release.xpi
Firefox allows you to have one or more user profiles. Create a FireVox
profile for Firefox.
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -CreateProfile firevox
Next run Firefox, telling it to load in the foreground with the new
profile and open the add-on installer.
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -foreground -P
firevox `pwd`/clc-4-tts_bundle_v4.0_release.xpi
Note the inline use of the pwd command to get the directory of the Fire
Vox bundle:
http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pwd.1.html
VoiceOver should now announce you are in a Mozilla Firefox window. This
will be the add-on installer, but no information about it is exposed to
Firefox. There are two buttons in the installer window "Cancel" and
"Install". "Install" is automatically focused. However, for security
reasons, the button is disabled for a short timeout. Count to 5 to
ensure the button is activable, then press Enter to install the add-on.
Now count to 5 again to give the add-on time to install. You should now
be in a window called "Add-ons" showing installed addons, but VoiceOver
can't read anything other than the window title and window controls.
Firefox needs to restart to enable the newly installed add-ons. Press
Command Q to quite Firefox.
Now start Firefox again with command, again running your profile:
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P firevox
With VoiceOver enabled, you should now be able to explore the Firefox
window and interface. FireVox is using Mac TTS for speech output.
There's a guide to the command line options for the Firefox binary at:
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Command_Line_Options
Hope that helps.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
