Re: firefox for android not accessible

On 25 February 2011 20:44, Kenny Hitt <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 07:42:36PM +0000, Steve Lee wrote:
>> [re sending to list]
>>
>> That seems to be the only game Google want to play. Trouble is you'll
>> get to take the hit merging the next official release
>>

My point here was that to work on ANY Android accessibility you can't
engage in open  development with Google. Rather you have to adapt the
source they occaisionaly make public, submit patches and hope, and
when next version comes out merge your work back in. All very painful.
Plus handset retailers who uses Android probably won't even see your
work. The only realistic way as David says is for Google to work with
the accessibility community and get it in core.

> For making firefox self voicing, newer versions of Android won't make any difference.  Remember, the accessibility api hasn't changed since 1.6,
> and the tts api hasn't changed since Android 2.0.

The point of self voicing is it doesn't use the APIs (unless I'm mis
understanding you). Rather it's a JS Firefox extension that examines
the page DOM and responds to events while driving speech directly
itself (through a special XPCOM component that has platform access).
It doesn't go near the platform a11y apis. and is only usable if
standard input interactions with browser are usable.

> Actually, you don't want to try extended features of the tts api on any Android version earlier than 2.2.

That's not good but actually I think all you need is 'say text' and
'stop speech'. At least that's all I use in Maavis.

> The tts-extended package has a nasty bug with speech rate.  It was reported before final release and ignored.

Sigh, again

> I don't like the idea of a self voicing solution because it excludes so many disabilities, but Google doesn't seem
> to give any other option.

+1
Proper platform APIs allow choice of user appropriate AT with any app


So the question remains - how the hell can we move on from this stupid
situation where any users of accessibility will not use Android?

Steve