First Glance at Firefox Accessibility on OS X Snow Leopard

I have been using a MacBook with the VoiceOver screen-reader for a little over a year now, and have recently upgraded the operating system to OS X Snow Leopard. Another thing that I have been doing for about a year is complaining that the Mozilla Firefox web browser is not accessible with the VoiceOver screen-reader.

Back in September of last year Marco Zehe wrote The current state of accessible Firefox on the Mac, your help is appreciated!. I read the article with interest, but did nothing to help out. Granting myself the benefit of the doubt, at that time I was involved in Drupal 7 accessibility work, moving, and starting a new job. I have recently decided that as the Drupal 7 development cycle is coming to a close and as I find enjoyment and relaxation in new learning challenges that it might be time to get involved in making Firefox accessible with VoiceOver on OS X Snow Leopard.

This morning I followed the directions at Mac OS X Build Prerequisites which explain reasonably clearly how to prepare the development environment, acquire the source and build Firefox on a Mac. In addition to these directions I followed the additional step described by Marco on how to make sure that accessibility support is enabled during the build process.

The experience of using Firefox with VoiceOver on Snow Leopard is very much like Marco describes in his article, and leaves a great deal to be desired. Indeed, Firefox really isn't accessible with VoiceOver; however, having built Firefox with accessibility enabled I do have some hope that we can see an accessible Firefox on the Mac in the not very distant future.