Accessible Mozilla: tech overview of Firefox 26 and Firefox 27

Here's a list of accessibility improvements for assistive technology in Firefox 26 (release) and Firefox 27 (beta).

HTML

HTML label gets a label accessible regardless used CSS styles (see bug), for example,

<label style="display: block; overflow: hidden;">Label</label>

LABEL_FOR relation is exposed on the label accessible implicitly associated with the control (see bug):

<label>Label
  <input>
</label>

MathML

In Firefox 27 we started to create a generic accessible tree for MathML elements, you can read here for details.

Text interface

We've got a bunch of text interface fixes including regression fixes introduced in Firefox 25 timeframe.

Arabic and Herbew character bounds are exposed correctly now (see bug).

XUL link accessible (used by Firefox UI) implements text interface (see bug).

Text selection

We reworked the TEXT_SELECTION_CHANGE eventing. In particular that allowed to fix events in case of selection spanned through several text objects like HTML paragraphs (see bug) and one pretty old Thunderbird bug where caret move events were missed (see bug).

IAccessible2

Firefox 27 has got IAccessible2::relationTargetsOfType (see bug) method from latest IAccessible2 release as well as new CONTAINING_DOCUMENT/TAB_PANE/APPLICATION relations (see bug). Check out this post for summary of IA2 1.3 release changes.

ISimpleDOMNode

ISimpleDOMDocument interface is implemented as tear off in Firefox 27. The change is similar to the one we did a year ago so it shouldn't hurt anybody. Just in case.