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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!

Often times I find that a jQuery plugin’s download link may not be the latest and greatest. Lately I’ve been going directly to the source :)

You can browse the jQuery Subversion repository online. The nice thing is you can see exactly when the author last update anything by looking at the revision and age.

Click the file you want. A new Trac page will open showing you the source with line numbers, etc. Simply scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click “Plain Text”. This will open a plain text view of the source which you can then save locally.