UIA implementation in Firefox

We decided to start implementation of UI Automation (UIA) in Firefox. Some reasons of doing this:

• UIA is considered as electronic curb cut effect. For example, it's used by Windows speech recognition and it's critical part to make your application working properly on Windows 8 Metro.
• MSAA to UIA bridge is not good from performance perspective, for example, Firefox is getting slow when speech recognition is running.
• By doing UIA Firefox can support Microsoft Narrator what is a plus.

We are going to make the work by parts starting from IAccessibleEx approach. You can watch our meta bug to follow the progress.

Some parts of UIA differs from IAccessible2 API, for example, text support is based on another concept. Thus it's going to take a while before you can try out something. During the implementation stage we think to keep UIA support disabled by default.

If you are contributor and you would like to help us with UIA implementation then you're welcome. You need to do some extra steps to what I wrote previously.

• Follow these steps to build Firefox on Windows 8. Note, until the mozilla-build release doesn't contain proper scripts you need to obtain them from mozilla-build repo and copy them into your mozilla-build installation folder.
• Add 'accessible.uia.enabled' pref and set it to true.
• Check out this bug list to find a bug to work on.

New contributors, welcome on board!

I remember that couple years ago I answered some Mozilla questionnaire and one of questions was "how many new contributors were involved into your project this year". That time I answered "none". Now I can say times were changed. Mozilla started the active engagement work and of course it brought a positive effect to Mozilla accessibility story.

I was the first one from accessibility team who volunteered to find good first bugs for new contributors and do mentoring. Now everyone from accessibility team joined. And I can say you why.

• It's really fun because you talk to new people who is passionate about open web, accessibility and Mozilla.
• You acquire new experience working closely with contributors having different styles and another way of thinking.
• New contributors do amazing work! Over the past three months about 150 bugs were fixed in accessibility module, over 30 bugs were fixed by new contributors.

As you can see results are very exiting.

Ok. What if you think Mozilla is cool or if you are passionate about accessibility. Then it's time to join!

If you are a hacker then you can start hacking on Firefox accessibility easily. Here are simple steps:

• Build your own Firefox from the source code.
• Get Bugzilla account.
• Look for a good first bug.
• Plunge into hacking immediately or contact to a mentor (see [mentor=email] at whiteboard field) if you have any questions.

Well, if you want to try something else outside the accessibility then there's a nice tool to find mentored bugs. Or if you are unsure about code hacking this time then check out how else you can get involved.

Interested? Do you want to change the web? Then welcome on board! It's really fun!