Some update about Firefox accessibility on Mac:

  • Accessibility on Mac has been disabled in Aurora 15 (and Nightly) shortly after the uplift early June. This was done because accessibility seemed to be instanciated for more than just accessibility clients, causing several unforeseen performance issues.
  • Accessibility on Mac has been re-enabled in last night Nightly 16 build for Mac. The changes are that now we whitelist VoiceOver before starting accessibility on the Mac. We also added a switch in about:config to force enable (bypass the white listing) or disable.
  • I have a current patch queue that include dealing with tab panels properly (bug 750612), text reading (bug 718625) and WAI-ARIA landmarks (bug 718700).

Using about:config: accessibility.force_disable. This option has 3 values:

  • 0 (default): do as usual
  • 1: disabled. Accessibility will not be started.
  • -1: force enabled. Accessibility will always start when requested, even without voice over.

This also works on Windows (the value -1 is unused) and soon on Linux with atk (I have to finish it)

I hope to get more rolling before we uplift Aurora 16.