An announcement was made by an employee and tester for Mozilla at the beginning of January, stating that although it is not quite ready for testing yet, the time is coming, within weeks.

On an update Marko and his team have made some progress. He writes:

"When I wrote the original blog post, what we had was very basic content rendering to VoiceOver or Accessibility Verifier. And I mean really basic. We had just crossed the point where loading a second page, or opening a new tab, would actually tell VoiceOver what content there was. Previously, it would not even take notice of the new content and still show the old stuff. Also, the web area was just now then being announced as “HTML content” by VoiceOver, like in Safari."

He then goes on to inform us that:

• Headings are now announced
• tabs count correctly
• all roles are now spoken
• dialogue text and other text speak completely
• links are activated through VoiceOver.

Things that still need to be worked on include:

• Navigating by character, or interacting with, the text in the awesome bar does not speak the character.
• Firefox doesn’t tell VoiceOver when it has finished loading a page
• passwords don’t yet give the audible feedback when typing
• VoiceOver doesn’t see form fields when nested within elements
• VoiceOver says the word "text" after every chunk of text inside a paragraph
• Various form elements states not communicated to VoiceOver [I.E. check boxes checked or unchecked]
• Landmarks not communicated to VoiceOver

Although the bare branches are all we have right now and no public beta build as yet, it seems the Firefox team are indeed working on the accessibility of Firefox with VoiceOver once again. We will keep you all informed as soon as we know the beta release is available. Lets hope we can all help contribute and make FireFox finally accessible for VoiceOver users on the mac.

Thanks to M.J. Phoenix for contributing this story.

The interface in version 6.0 has changed to resemble the one used in the iOS version of the software. It is completely accessible with VoiceOver. When a VoiceOver user navigates to the image for your router, it even indicates if it is working properly and which color light is being shown on the device.

Thanks to John Panarese of MacForTheBlind for the heads up.

We will answer as many questions as we can in the time we have. Not all questions are guaranteed to be answered, but we will keep unanswered questions on hand for future Q&A shows, and will produce more Q&A shows if our listeners find them useful.

In general, Apple has taken an approach to Xcode which mirrors that which they employed in making GarageBand accessible. Due to the complex nature of the user interface, the app has been divided into major sections which VoiceOver calls "groups". This makes understanding and navigating the myriad of controls, settings, and features with VoiceOver a vastly improved experience.

While more workable now than in the past, the Interface Builder portion of Xcode still provides some challenges. However, thanks to recent improvements, it is now possible to construct a UI with VoiceOver, though it is still not an ideal workflow. It should be noted, though, that with the increased popularity of both Mac OS X and the iOS operating systems, more information is readily available for building UI’s via code, which may prove to be the more efficient method for some visually impaired developers.

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Steve Jobs has been named Chairman of the Board of Directors, and Tim Cook has already been elected CEO of Apple Inc.

On behalf of all of us here at Mac-cessibility, I’d like to offer Mr. Jobs our heartfelt thanks for his years of service to Apple and its customers, and wish him the very best.

• RoaringApps.com – A site to check the Lion compatibility of your applications
• Tunesify Lite – A Mac app for converting FLAC files to a more useful format
• Hanging with Friends Free – A Hangman game that is mostly accessible with VoiceOver

• Group pick:
  • The Macalope
• Darcy’s picks:
  • YoruFukurou
  • WorthWhile
  • Sudoku Tablet
• Holly’s picks:
  • SlingPlayer Mobile
  • 7 Little Words
  • Cards Alone
• Josh’s picks:
  • Tagalicious
  • Sound Studio
  • Podcaster for iPhone
• M.J.’s picks:
  • NewsRack for Mac
  • MacJournal
  • StoryMill
• Eric’s picks:
  • Ariadne GPS
  • NewsRack for iPhone/iPad
  • Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide
• Cara’s picks:
  • VizWiz
  • Looktell Money Reader
  • MarsEdit

1. First, make sure Dropbox isn’t already running.  One of the first things the setup program does is to place Dropbox in to your login items.  So even if you were unsuccessful installing it in the past, the app may be running.  Go in to Activity Monitor and look at the process table.  If there are any entries for dropbox, you can remove them by selecting “quit process” from the toolbar.
2. Make sure you have the latest version of the Dropbox software in your Applications folder.  At the time of this writing, the latest version is 1.1.34.
3. In the Finder, go to your Applications folder, select Dropbox, and press VO-Shift-m From the resulting context menu, select “view package contents”.
4. A folder called Contents will appear.  Open it and select the MacOS folder.
5. From here, you’ll find a file called Dropbox, that you need to open.  This is a unix executable file, and will open in the terminal.  You can ignore this terminal window for the time being.
6. After a few seconds, the Dropbox setup will appear.  This setup dialog is self explanatory and completely accessible.  At some point during the setup, you may hear VoiceOver announce the presence of a new window.  This is an authentication dialog, where you must enter your admin password.  If focus does not shift to this window, you’ll have to use the VoiceOver window chooser to get there.

After you’ve completed the setup, Dropbox should be properly configured and working.  It’s worth noting that since you launched Dropbox from the terminal, that’s where it will be running.  So if you quit the terminal, Dropbox will quit as well.  Once you’ve done this, you can reopen it in the normal way, the way you would open any other Application.

This is, and should be, troubling to many Mac and iOS users. Microsoft has shown a distinct disinterest in adhering to accessibility standards on Apple’s platforms. The Microsoft Office suite, for example, has yet to be made compatible with Apple’s accessibility frameworks, and Microsoft has made no known effort to change this. Their Messenger app for iOS is entirely unusable.

In significant contrast to Microsoft, many, if not most, developers for Mac OS X and iOS have been very receptive to improving the accessibility of their applications, due in no small part to the ease with which Apple’s tools make this process. Skype, despite some flaws, was one company that had certainly made a concerted effort, most noticeable in Skype 5, though that version of the program has an interface which blind and sited users alike find lacking for other reasons than accessibility.

Only time will tell if Microsoft will continue to allow the Skype developers to improve and ensure access to this application which many visually impaired users find invaluable. Given Microsoft’s track record, however, the future for VoiceOver users of Skype could potentially be grim.

Notes:

• Darcy’s pick – TextExpander
• M.J.’s picks – BopIt and PlainText
• Josh’s pick – Magic Trackpad
• Cara’s pick – Fandango Movies
• Holly’s pick – DraftPad

Have you used iLife 11 with VoiceOver yet? Let us know in the comments.

Fortunately, a workaround has been posted which gives VoiceOver users the ability to install the latest version of the Flash plugin. Here are the steps:

• Download FlashPlayer version 10.1 from Adobe Systems
• Mount the disk image (.DMG) which was downloaded.
• Open the context menu on the installation application included on the disk image – "Install Adobe Flash Player.app" (VO-Shift-M)
• Select the option to "Show Package Contents".
• The contents of the app file will be displayed in a new Finder window. Navigate through the folders to Contents/Resources/
• At that location, you will find an installation package called "Adobe Flash Player.pkg". Open this package with Command-O

At this point, you can follow the normal installation steps, presented as a traditional Mac OS X installer, which is, of course, accessible.

Given the eighteen months to two years we can expect to wait for Flash accessibility, as well as the fact that, had Apple allowed Flash-based apps on the AppStore, VoiceOver users would have been subjected to far greater risks of inaccessibility when purchasing apps on their iOS devices, it is not surprising that users are taking Adobe’s assurances of a commitment to accessibility with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Thanks to John C. Welch and DaringFireball for bringing this workaround to our attention.

• resolve an issue that causes the keyboard or trackpad to become unresponsive
• resolve an issue that may prevent some Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications from opening
• address issues copying, renaming, or deleting files on SMB file servers
• improve reliability of VPN connections
• resolve a playback issue in DVD Player when using Good Quality deinterlacing
• resolve an issue editing photos with iPhoto or Aperture in full screen view
• improve compatibility with some braille displays

Release notes are seldom all inclusive, so we’ll keep you posted on any additional accessibility-related changes or fixes in Mac OS X 10.6.4 as details become available.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4 is available via the "Software Update" mechanism on any Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.

The latest version of Apple’s popular web browser features the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4, and the ability to choose between Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac OS X and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience.

Safari 5 is available via Mac OS X’s "Software Update" mechanism.

We will be covering the event live via this live stream, and listeners may interact with one another and with the hosts of our stream on Twitter by using the hash tag #VOLive in their tweets.

Our coverage will begin streaming shortly before the keynote begins at 10:00 AM PDT, 1:00 PM EDT. We hope to see you there!