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.

While version 1.0 was ground-breaking in itself in its brilliance in accuracy and ease of use, version 2 takes this app to a whole new level.

Several new currencies are now supported, including the Euro, Canadian and Australian dollars, as well as the British Pound. This allows Money Reader to bring its stellar performance to so many more people than before to assist in making people’s lives easier and more enjoyable.

You can learn more at: http://www.looktel.com

• 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.

This is a fantastic development for visually impaired book lovers, providing unparalleled access to published works to them at the same time as said works are available to their sighted counterparts.

Many Random House titles have already begun appearing in the iBooks store, including those by such bestselling authors as Anne Rice, Dan Brown, and others.

For visually impaired readers, this news is spectacular, particularly given the poor accessibility efforts thus far from the Amazon Kindle and Adobe Digital Editions platforms.