5 ms·

Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows if you are using a screen reader, in the past 2 years. And Android took almos

by lynx23 4y ago

Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows if you are using a screen reader, in the past 2 years. And Android took almost a decade to catch up to what Apple did with iOS. So I am guessing, this new browser will need at least 5 years to be looked at by blind users :-)

ChickenNugger 4y ago
This is one thing that the big dogs, Microsoft, and Apple have been good at since the early '90s. For all their faults, they take accessibility seriously. I know a blind guy who uses iPhones exclusively. How he manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but dedicating resources to accessibility when it's such a tiny market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it, are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.
- lynx23 4y ago
  No, they are not being mandated. It basically boils down to Jobs declaring that accessibility is an exceiption to ROI. IOW, realising its a kind of social responsibility. Besides, Microsoft took a long time to provide something by default, they let other third parties sell screen readers for big money to poor people. Apple always did both built-in, the API and the screen reader (frontend). Microsoft created Narrator, their own front-end, just a few years ago.
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    My memories of Windows' screen reader telling me "MY ROFLCOPTER GOES SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI" when I was a teen may have exaggerated Microsoft's efforts. But at least it was there.
    - idonotknowwhy 4y ago
      Same. Microsoft SAM was fun in high school. Foreground window untitled notepad Editible text soi soi soi soi soi
  - serial_dev 4y ago
    I tried to Google what Jobs said about accessibility... I only found what Tim Cook had to say: "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI (...) The company does a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
    - lynx23 4y ago
      Cook is just walking the road which has been paved by Jobs...
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        If only Jobs had the foresight to put other social responsibilities before ROI...
    - rappr 4y ago
      Because it was Tim Cook that made accessibility a priority, not Steve Jobs.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    There is still a lot of work for the OS to do to enable those third-party tools. Stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility It may well be that Apple is special, but in general, large software companies are motivated to care about accessibility primarily by the prospect of lucrative government contracts, for which there are usually mandated (by law) accessibility requirements. The problem for smaller companies is that accessibility doesn't scale down well - you need a lot of upfront investment (education, processes, testing etc) to get anywhere at all at first, but then all that remains useful for many more projects to come.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      And there's still a lot of work for the third-party tools to do, too. https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-209220791 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-20... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933 I read somewhere that screen readers look for a flashing vertical line, to detect the caret position in systems that don't expose it via the OS's APIs. I can't find a reference for that right now, though.
  - matwood 4y ago
    > is an exceiption to ROI I'd argue that accessibility helps everyone, and is thus a positive to ROI. You know those low contrast text/background sites everyone here complains about? Yep, those are not accessible, and probably end up with less readers as a result.
beltsazar 4y ago
That's unfortunate, but you don't have to use Firefox. I don't understand why some people think more options are bad. You can still use Safari or Chrome.
- blub 4y ago
  Chrome is spyware under a different name and they won the desktop market by sabotaging Firefox and taking advantage of their search monopoly by blatantly advertising their browser. Most developers focus on the technical features and miss what giving such a bad actor a chance to monopolize another device category means. Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google’s dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal. But then you've stooped to their level.
    - blub 4y ago
      That may seem wrong only because you’re thinking about things very literally. In reality it would blocking a known monopolist with a track record of bad behavior from monopolizing another market and allowing everyone else including Firefox to take part.
  - dariosalvi78 4y ago
    Chrome won because the alternative at that time was Internet Explorer. And it's an excellent thing that it has won. There are plenty of Chrome based alternatives that are not spyware of you are bothered by that.
    - berkes 4y ago
      That's blatantly untrue. Firefox won from IE. it successfully broke the IE monopoly and gained significant market share. Then, years later, chrome entered the stage and conquered both.
trymas 4y ago
> Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components makes the experience not good. Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the situation is still way behind everyone else. I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of times, even though don't use their product, but at least on macos - experience is too bad for me to use it. [0] https://macpassapp.org/ https://macpassapp.org/
gostsamo 4y ago
I'm writing this comment with a screen reader on firefox. Not sure what your issues are, but the accessibility has been rather stable for me after they fixed the quantum disaster.
- lynx23 4y ago
  Interesting. For me, moving with the cursor in most webpages has become extremely slow around half a year ago. I hit cursor down, and braille and speech update after about 1 second. I am on Win10 with JAWS 2022/2023.
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    Win10, NVDA, no braille. Only difference with the chromium browsers that I've observed is that initially pages take half a second more to load, but it is likely due to the different adblockers I have installed.

by lynx23 4y ago

ChickenNugger 4y ago

This is one thing that the big dogs, Microsoft, and Apple have been good at since the early '90s. For all their faults, they take accessibility seriously. I know a blind guy who uses iPhones exclusively. How he manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but dedicating resources to accessibility when it's such a tiny market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it, are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.

lynx23 4y ago
No, they are not being mandated. It basically boils down to Jobs declaring that accessibility is an exceiption to ROI. IOW, realising its a kind of social responsibility. Besides, Microsoft took a long time to provide something by default, they let other third parties sell screen readers for big money to poor people. Apple always did both built-in, the API and the screen reader (frontend). Microsoft created Narrator, their own front-end, just a few years ago.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  My memories of Windows' screen reader telling me "MY ROFLCOPTER GOES SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI" when I was a teen may have exaggerated Microsoft's efforts. But at least it was there.
  - idonotknowwhy 4y ago
    Same. Microsoft SAM was fun in high school. Foreground window untitled notepad Editible text soi soi soi soi soi
- serial_dev 4y ago
  I tried to Google what Jobs said about accessibility... I only found what Tim Cook had to say: "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI (...) The company does a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
  - lynx23 4y ago
    Cook is just walking the road which has been paved by Jobs...
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      If only Jobs had the foresight to put other social responsibilities before ROI...
  - rappr 4y ago
    Because it was Tim Cook that made accessibility a priority, not Steve Jobs.
- int_19h 4y ago
  There is still a lot of work for the OS to do to enable those third-party tools. Stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility It may well be that Apple is special, but in general, large software companies are motivated to care about accessibility primarily by the prospect of lucrative government contracts, for which there are usually mandated (by law) accessibility requirements. The problem for smaller companies is that accessibility doesn't scale down well - you need a lot of upfront investment (education, processes, testing etc) to get anywhere at all at first, but then all that remains useful for many more projects to come.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    And there's still a lot of work for the third-party tools to do, too. https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-209220791 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-20... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933 I read somewhere that screen readers look for a flashing vertical line, to detect the caret position in systems that don't expose it via the OS's APIs. I can't find a reference for that right now, though.
- matwood 4y ago
  > is an exceiption to ROI I'd argue that accessibility helps everyone, and is thus a positive to ROI. You know those low contrast text/background sites everyone here complains about? Yep, those are not accessible, and probably end up with less readers as a result.

beltsazar 4y ago

That's unfortunate, but you don't have to use Firefox. I don't understand why some people think more options are bad. You can still use Safari or Chrome.

blub 4y ago
Chrome is spyware under a different name and they won the desktop market by sabotaging Firefox and taking advantage of their search monopoly by blatantly advertising their browser. Most developers focus on the technical features and miss what giving such a bad actor a chance to monopolize another device category means. Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google’s dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal. But then you've stooped to their level.
  - blub 4y ago
    That may seem wrong only because you’re thinking about things very literally. In reality it would blocking a known monopolist with a track record of bad behavior from monopolizing another market and allowing everyone else including Firefox to take part.
- dariosalvi78 4y ago
  Chrome won because the alternative at that time was Internet Explorer. And it's an excellent thing that it has won. There are plenty of Chrome based alternatives that are not spyware of you are bothered by that.
  - berkes 4y ago
    That's blatantly untrue. Firefox won from IE. it successfully broke the IE monopoly and gained significant market share. Then, years later, chrome entered the stage and conquered both.

trymas 4y ago

> Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components makes the experience not good. Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the situation is still way behind everyone else. I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of times, even though don't use their product, but at least on macos - experience is too bad for me to use it. [0] https://macpassapp.org/ https://macpassapp.org/

gostsamo 4y ago

I'm writing this comment with a screen reader on firefox. Not sure what your issues are, but the accessibility has been rather stable for me after they fixed the quantum disaster.

lynx23 4y ago
Interesting. For me, moving with the cursor in most webpages has become extremely slow around half a year ago. I hit cursor down, and braille and speech update after about 1 second. I am on Win10 with JAWS 2022/2023.
- gostsamo 4y ago
  Win10, NVDA, no braille. Only difference with the chromium browsers that I've observed is that initially pages take half a second more to load, but it is likely due to the different adblockers I have installed.