I should notice I'm not a screen reader user and therefore my front-end observations might be not complete or not accurate. Please correct me if I say something wrong.
Windows 8 beta is out. I saw a bunch of posts saying that Microsoft
improved accessibility support, in particular that Narrator was greatly refined over previous versions including outstanding performance in IE. So I wanted to play with Narrator and see how it works in Firefox.
The background of the interest
is sort of pragmatic. I'm curious whether the market share of screen readers can be shifted after Windows 8 release. The rationally is simple. If some OS provides a set of built-in applications then the user gets all-in-one solution. And if those applications are good enough then many users don't need anything else. So I wasn't going to do any truth worth research but I wanted to see myself how the things look.
On Windows Mozilla bets on
IAccessible2, an open standard developed by number of companies including both AT client vendors (screen readers, screen magnifiers etc) and AT server vendors. I don't think this is going to change but if Firefox wasn't nice on Narrator and if Narrator takes a certain percent of the market share then we at Mozilla can't leave this unaddressed.
This time I didn't pay an attention to touch-based accessibility
features despite this is definitely a crucial part for mobile web. But this is certainly big area deserving own topic. I
focused on how Narrator is doing on the web in classical desktop case.
Narrator
The first noticeable thing is Narrator highlights traversed objects similar to what Voice Over does. This should be a neat feature for teaching and training. I liked the help dialog to see command shortcuts which is good for newbies. Another interesting feature the Narrator allows to bring a dialog
containing the list of available actions on the current object and the
user can pick up the one to invoke.
Narrator is fast, at least I didn't noticed any lags when I navigated
the web. Moreover I've got an impression that sometimes it's faster than
NVDA (both on IE and Firefox).
It provides hierarchical virtual cursor: arrow keys allows you to move into container, navigate through siblings within a container and move outside a container. It seems that the implementation is quite plain, it just moves the virtual cursor through accessible tree. You may consider this as a benefit since often this allows you to skip easily a large portions of the page. However taking into account that containers aren't provided by any good description then this is rather useless feature, at least until the user learns the hierarchy for each web site he visits. To Narrator credit I must say it announces the amount of items within certain containers.
On the other hand the web pages and especially web applications have quite complicated trees and that makes navigation not trivial. I'm not experienced user but I feel like NVDA approach is nicer. Narrator approach sounded for me like it's more suitable for tree inspection for debugging proposes rather than for document navigation in the wild.
I looked how Narrator goes with some applications like GMail. I was able
to navigate the whole GMail, however sometimes the virtual cursor
reached a certain point and didn't move further. I was forced to use
tab to skip this place. Also I wasn't able to locate some menus of menu buttons. I think this is because these menus weren't in hierarchy of the button. So you might want to blame Gmail.
Narrator allows to navigate the text, provides commands to traverse the page by paragraphs and supports table navigation but I didn't make it to do more complicated structural navigation like navigation by
headings, links etc. It doesn't sound like Narrator has it.
MSAA / UIA / IAccessible2
Windows 8 makes some work to map MSAA to UIA and that allows Narrator to work with MSAA applications. That makes Firefox accessible in principle. For example, you can navigate the web pages and do basic interaction with control elements like open a link, click a button etc. But MSAA accessibility is quite restricted.
Narrator allows the user to navigate by paragraphs, lines, words and characters. It provides some support of text attributes. None of these features work in Firefox. When the document is loaded then Narrator starts reading it. Again not in Firefox.
In summary Firefox doesn't look cool in Narrator. It's sort of expected because Firefox doesn't implement UIA.
I didn't really believe that Microsoft will bridge IAccessible2 to UIA but I hoped. That would allow a number of applications like Eclipse, Open Office or Firefox to work great for Narrator users. Sometimes dreams may not come true.
