Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla. And I would like to share the following announcement with the AppleVis community.
Firefox 85 Beta is here and with it our consumer preview of macOS VoiceOver support. Until recently it was completely unusable in Firefox but this year the Firefox accessibility team stepped up to fix that.
We started in February, with Firefox 75, and kept up the pace through the next ten releases. We implemented dozens of features and fixed hundreds of bugs. Now, with Firefox 85 Beta, we think our VoiceOver support is complete enough and fast enough that a full-time screen reader user could rely on it as their daily driver.
There are surely some bugs still lurking, and maybe even a missing feature or two. And that’s where you come in. We’re announcing this preview to gather feedback on what’s working well and what’s not working great. So, if you haven’t yet, download or update to Firefox 85 Beta and try it out with VoiceOver. If you find issues, please report them to Bugzilla or find us on Matrix and share your feedback there.
In addition, I will be monitoring the comments to this thread for feedback.
Thank you all for your continued inquiries into when Firefox would finally support VoiceOver! Your persistence was one of the factors that finally made this project possible.
Regards, Marco
Comments
Possible bug
Hello,
So far it is working well. All my plugins and bookmarks synced over from my windows installation of Firefox. One issue I have run into is that when you type into the search field on google.com, VoiceOver will not echo what you type or delete.
Hi Marco Very cool! Thanks…
Hi Marco
Very cool! Thanks for working on this - I'm really looking forward to giving it a spin!
Best
Malthe
Excellent news!
Thank you for your work on this project and for pointing us towards the beta release. I look forward to taking it for a test drive ☺️
Hi Greg, thank you, this is…
Hi Greg,
thank you, this is indeed a bug. We do not handle controls with combobox properties very well. I filed a bug on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682865
Problem with quitting
I've only spent a brief time with the beta so far, but have already hit a possible issue with simply quitting the application.
It appears that by default a dialog box is displayed when you attempt to quit the application, which asks if you are sure. I've not yet found how to access and action this dialog, leaving me to force quit the application.
It's probably just me being dumb, but it did frustrate somewhat.
Close all tabs question
Hi! This is the "Do you want to close multiple tabs" question. You should be able to tab into it and act on the buttons. We seem to have a problem where this dialog doesn't always get to the foreground.
About time.
About time they added accessibility when firefox has always been usable on windows. But I use chrome now, so meh.
Bug with moving line by line
Hello,
When I select line in the VO rotar, I am only able to move by one line and thats it. It will not move to another line. Also sometimes when I try and move by line focusthe with the text does not help. will jump back to the top of the page. Interacting with
Bug with edit fields
Hello,
I finding tying echo to be slow in edit fields. In order for VO to tell me the word I just typed I have to wait at least a second or two after hearing the space announced before it will say the word I just typed.
asking a question before I try it
Hi. Someone wants their ke ystrokes echoed when typing a word in say google. Is that a verbocity dialog setting that can be either customized to the user's preference, or possibly in the preferences settings? Because for me personally, I type so fast, it would bug the heck out of me to hear every silly thing i typed in search terms. thanks.