Firefox Status Bar

Hi Gregory,

I don't use a screen reader so I'm not sure how the following will work 
for you but they are worth trying.

The Organize Status Bar extension for Firefox allows you to hide and 
rearrange the items in the Status Bar. A lot add-ons (but not all) have 
alternative means for accessing them other than just in the status bar 
so you could obviously hide those.
Organize Status Bar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1759

I prefer to have a second status bar rather than lose any icons so I use 
the Statusable Firefox add-on that provides a second status bar (at the 
very bottom) dedicated to displaying an URL and the page loading 
progress meter. It would be ideal to use Statusable and Organize Status 
Bar but there are incompatibilities between the two (despite there being 
a so called patched version for Organize Status Bar). Now you end up 
having two status bars, but my solution is a toggle status bar toolbar 
button that will toggle the status bar with the icons on it to viewable 
and not.
There are a lot of great toolbar buttons developed by Michael Buckley 
(including accessibility related ones). You can choose just the ones 
that you want and a single installable XPI will be created and most of 
them are usable in Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird.
I also use CSS for Stylish for my own status bar customizations to 
enlarge the text and increase margins and padding between status bar 
icons. If anyone is interested in that, I'll post it. You won't need 
Stylish, you can paste it into your userChrome.css (I can provide 
instructions for that).

Also, you should be able to get access to toggle Firefox toolbars with 
your screen reader by going to View > Toolbars and check or uncheck the 
toolbars that you want displayed or hidden.

If you need help with any of this, please feel free to ask.

I hope that this helps.

Statusable Firefox add-on (adds second status bar)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4156

Toolbar Button Maker (toggle status bar button and many others)
http://codefisher.org/toolbar_button/toolbar_button_maker