Accessible Mozilla: Tech overview of Firefox 24

Here's a list of Firefox 24 (currently Aurora) improvements for assistive technology.

ARIA

We supported one more way to create hierarchy for ARIA lists and trees (see bug). Now you can do

  <ul role="list">
    <li role="listitem">Item 1
      <ul role="group">
        <li role="listitem">Item 1A</li>
        <li role="listitem">Item 1B</li>
      </ul>
    </li>
    <li role="listitem">Item 2
      <ul role="group">
        <li role="listitem">Item 2A</li>
        <li role="listitem">Item 2B</li>          
      </ul>
    </li>
  </li> 

So following this pattern allows you to get for free the group position for items and relations between them.

It's worth to say that Firefox supports another kind of hierarchy for ARIA trees for a long time:

  <div role="tree">
    <div role="treeitem">Item 1</div>
    <div role="group">
      <div role="treeitem">Item 1A</div>
      <div role="treeitem">Item 1B</div>
    </div>
    <div role="treeitem">Item 2</div>
    <div role="group">
      <div role="treeitem">Item 2A</div>
      <div role="treeitem">Item 2B</div>          
    </div>
  </div> 

Here ARIA group element defines a sub group of items for the item preceding to it.

You can use either hierarchy that suites better for you. Note, second approach doesn't work in case of ARIA lists.

HTML

datalist attribute on the widget makes the accessible object to expose HASPOPUP state in addition to SUPPORTS_AUTOCOMPLETION state we used to have (see bug).

Action interface works on HTML textarea element now.

HTML td elements may be pointed by headers attribute, i.e. HTML td can serve as row/column header. In other words the following pattern is supported:

  <table>
    <tr><td id="juice">Juice</td></tr>
    <tr><td headers="juice">Orange</td></tr>
    <tr><td headers="juice">Apple</td></tr>
  </table>

Moving at the "orange" or "apple" cell by screen reader you will hear that this is orange or apple juice.

Text work

getTextAfterOffset and getTextBeforeOffset methods for word boundaries were improved a bit (see bug and bug). There are still problems left.

IAccessible2

We did first steps on the way to implement new IAccessible2 version released couple months ago. We've got IA2_RELATION_NODE_PARENT_OF relation exposed on ARIA and XUL trees (thanks to Zach who volunteered for this work).

Note, alternatively to IAccessible2 relation interface you can obtain this relation by MSAA IAccessible::accNavigation method using 0x1010 constant. Refer to our source code for all possible values (no docs sorry).

Another bit of IA2 support was IA2_STATE_CHECKABLE (thanks to Marcos A. Di Pietro for the fix). You can see this state on all checkbox-like widgets. Prior to this state the checkable:true object attribute was used for that. Now we expose state and object attribute both.

User interface

Menu items of Firefox UI have correct state now, i.e. no OFFSCREEN state for visible menu items anymore (see bug).

Pinned tabs in Firefox UI expose IA2_STATE_PINNED now.