FIREFOX 1.5: WEB BROWSING BEYOND THE STATUS QUO
Presenter(s)
Aaron Leventhal
IBM
14 Crosby Street
Arlington MA 02474
Day Phone: 781-583-4083
Fax: 781-583-4083
Email: aleventh@us.ibm.com
Presenter #2
Glen Gordon
Freedom Scientific
11800 31st Court North
St. Petersburg FL 33716
Day Phone: 607-272-5787
Email: gleng@freedomscientific.com
Presenter #3
Michael Betlzner
Mozilla Foundation
Day Phone: 650-903-0800
Email: beltzner@mozilla.com
Firefox 1.5 is a free, popular, mainstream web browser with great
accessibility features. We will demonstrate Firefox's unique features and
integration with screen readers and other assistive technologies.
Introduction
Firefox has become a very popular web browser in a short period of time.
More than 100 million users downloaded it in the first year as it reached 10%
market share penetration, and it has won major awards such as PC World Product
of the Year.
The reason for Firefox's popularity is that it is fast, standards
compliant, and takes a fresh approach to making the web work for everyone.
Firefox rethinks the web, and deals with many of the common annoyances that
cause browsing to be difficult for ordinary people. Firefox's "WWW for
everyone" philosophy calls out for a great accessibility story, as people
with disabilities need a streamlined web browsing experience free of popup ads
and adware just like everyone else.
This very kind of rethinking has led to the question, "Why can't
Javascript web pages be more accessible?" And indeed, Firefox is the first
web browser to bring accessibility to rich internet applications built from
technologies such as Javascript,
About This Session
During the session we will cover the full spectrum of features available to
all users of Firefox. This includes feature that protect users from annoying
realities of the web today like adware, spyware, viruses and popup ads. Firefox
also helps you stay organized and find things quickly with features like tabbed
browsing, FastBack, FastFind, the built-in web search bar, custom smart
keywords, the download manager, and history and bookmark search. We will also
discuss "extensions" that can be installed to enhance the individual
browsing experience. One such extension is The Accessibility Extension from
We will also cover features that are specific to accessibility. First, we
will show the built-in unlimited text-zoom in Firefox. Next, Glen Gordon from
Freedom Scientific will demonstrate compatibility with the JAWS screen reader,
and will discuss the similarities and differences with other accessible web
browsers available today. We will also discuss what other assistive
technologies currently support Firefox or will in upcoming releases.
Web and software standards are important for any modern web browser. We
will briefly discuss the important standards Firefox supports, including
Section 508 compliance and basic web standards such as CSS, DOM and XHTML.
Finally we will touch on a standard being developed at the W3C, called DHTML
accessibility. Firefox is the first web browser to support it, and it will
enable accessible rich internet applications that use Javascript and even
Next, Michael Beltzner from Mozilla and Aaron Leventhal from IBM will
discuss the community process behind the Firefox "open source"
phenomenon. Open source accessibility is an interesting topic in its own right,
and audience members will be encouraged to ask questions about it. For example,
will open source products be more accessible simply because programmers with
disabilities can go in and fix problems? Will organizations of persons with
disabilities be able to take a more proactive approach in solving the
employment problems faced by their members? Where does an end user get support
for an open source product like Firefox?
We will put the open source approach into practice during the session and
ask audience members for ideas to put into Firefox 2.0. At the end of the
session we will have an interactive brainstorming period where we will take
down ideas and thoughts on priorities. Should Mozilla put more effort into
making their Thunderbird email software accessible? What's more important,
accessibility for diagrams (SVG), mathematics (MathML), next generation forms
(XForms) or Firefox running on Linux? How can we leverage the community process
and features like the broken website reporter tool to drive web authors toward
better accessibility?
Michael and Aaron will end the session by providing resources for
interested parties.
Go to previous article
Go to next article
Return to 2006 Table of Contents