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Safari 4 and Accessibility

14 June, 2009 @ 9:45 am by Lioncourt

Last week, Apple released Safari 4, the latest version of their popular web browsing solution. This incarnation offers some accessibility enhancements, as well as a number of new features.

As we reported previously, Safari 4 corrects a number of accessibility problems that plagued earlier versions, such as same page links and multi-select list boxes. Additionally, the final release corrects a problem in the public beta where buttons with images were not being read properly.

One of Safari’s new and widely touted features is its "Top Sites" functionality. In the public beta, this feature was inaccessible with VoiceOver. We are pleased to see that, in the final release, it works very well, and should prove a very useful tool for many users.

One strange and unfortunate issue, however, is that running VoiceOver with Safari 4 while browsing Apple’s online store pages frequently causes the browser to unexpected crash. One can work around this problem by turning off VoiceOver before clicking links, buttons, or other elements that will load a new page, and then restarting it once the new page has finished loading. This is a fairly significant problem, and we expect a fix from Apple before long.

Overall, this is a strong update for the browser, with several improvements to accessibility.

Posted in Apple Inc., Apple News, Safari, VoiceOver | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Safari 4 and Accessibility”

  1. Jake observed:

    Regarding the crash on the Apple Store pages, as well as a few others, Apple has already fixed this in the most recent builds of Webkit, and they should have a fix out for the general release of Safari 4.0 very soon according to their accessibility folks. They definitely realize this is a major problem, and it is obviously a rather serious regression. One would’ve thought they’d at least use some of their own store pages to test out Voiceover before releasing Safari 4, considering there’s some rather complex scriptlets on that page they’d want to make sure were read by Voiceover for their own site in addition to where similar scripts are used on other pages. The good thing is that they’re on top of it and have the issue resolved, let’s just hope they backport the fix to the system-wide Webkit used by Safari very soon.
    It is a bit worrying, for those just trying out Safari 4 and Voiceover it will not leave a good impression, and we all know that first impressions carry a great deal of weight when someone is first using any new bit of technology and, coupled with all the misinformation out there… let’s just say further testing with Voiceover before release would have been a very good idea.

    June 14th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
  2. Chris remarked:

    I have just updated to the latest version of Safari and I’m glad to have had the foresight to read this post before visiting the ITunes store. You didn’t specifically mention the ITunes store but your reference to “online store pages” has made me somewhat apprehensive about browsing for new podcasts.

    June 20th, 2009 at 7:42 pm

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