I’ve been using jQuery more and more at work but have been having to hold off some of the more advanced uses because of accessibility concerns. Working with the Government we are looking more and more at 508 and accessibility and right now AJAX is a bit of a gray area.
Today John Resig (author of jQuery) has a great blog post about Ajax Accessibility in which he discusses Google’s use of ARIA in Google Reader and also mentions Fire Vox:
Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox.
In addition to the basic features that are expected of screen readers, such as being able to identify headings, links, images, etc. and providing navigational assistance, Fire Vox provides support for MathML and CSS speech module properties. It also works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
I’ll certainly be setting this up today to give it a whirl! If you are interesting in accessibility, 508, and AJAX I’d check out John’s post!
Possibly Related:
The John Resig on Accessibility, ARIA and Fire Vox by Jim , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Quick update! Fire Vox works really well - though the default voices included in Windows XP suck. One minor conflict - Fire Vox by default uses CTRL+SHIFT+KEY for it’s shortcuts. This conflicts with the WebDeveloper toolbar for Firefox. Unfortunately neither extension allows you to change the CTRL+SHIFT key combo.