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Comment by lynx23 | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows if you are using a screen reader, in the past 2 years. And Android took almost a decade to catch up to what Apple did with iOS. So I am guessing, this new browser will need at least 5 years to be looked at by blind users :-)

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This is one thing that the big dogs, Microsoft, and Apple have been good at since the early '90s. For all their faults, they take accessibility seriously.

I know a blind guy who uses iPhones exclusively. How he manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but dedicating resources to accessibility when it's such a tiny market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it, are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.

No, they are not being mandated. It basically boils down to Jobs declaring that accessibility is an exceiption to ROI. IOW, realising its a kind of social responsibility. Besides, Microsoft took a long time to provide something by default, they let other third parties sell screen readers for big money to poor people. Apple always did both built-in, the API and the screen reader (frontend). Microsoft created Narrator, their own front-end, just a few years ago.

I tried to Google what Jobs said about accessibility... I only found what Tim Cook had to say:

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI (...) The company does a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."

Because it was Tim Cook that made accessibility a priority, not Steve Jobs.

Cook is just walking the road which has been paved by Jobs...

If only Jobs had the foresight to put other social responsibilities before ROI...

My memories of Windows' screen reader telling me "MY ROFLCOPTER GOES SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI" when I was a teen may have exaggerated Microsoft's efforts.

But at least it was there.

Same. Microsoft SAM was fun in high school.

Foreground window untitled notepad Editible text soi soi soi soi soi

There is still a lot of work for the OS to do to enable those third-party tools. Stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility

It may well be that Apple is special, but in general, large software companies are motivated to care about accessibility primarily by the prospect of lucrative government contracts, for which there are usually mandated (by law) accessibility requirements. The problem for smaller companies is that accessibility doesn't scale down well - you need a lot of upfront investment (education, processes, testing etc) to get anywhere at all at first, but then all that remains useful for many more projects to come.

And there's still a lot of work for the third-party tools to do, too.

https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-20...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888

https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933

I read somewhere that screen readers look for a flashing vertical line, to detect the caret position in systems that don't expose it via the OS's APIs. I can't find a reference for that right now, though.

> is an exceiption to ROI

I'd argue that accessibility helps everyone, and is thus a positive to ROI. You know those low contrast text/background sites everyone here complains about? Yep, those are not accessible, and probably end up with less readers as a result.

That's unfortunate, but you don't have to use Firefox. I don't understand why some people think more options are bad. You can still use Safari or Chrome.

Chrome is spyware under a different name and they won the desktop market by sabotaging Firefox and taking advantage of their search monopoly by blatantly advertising their browser. Most developers focus on the technical features and miss what giving such a bad actor a chance to monopolize another device category means.

Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google’s dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.

> If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.

But then you've stooped to their level.

That may seem wrong only because you’re thinking about things very literally. In reality it would blocking a known monopolist with a track record of bad behavior from monopolizing another market and allowing everyone else including Firefox to take part.

Chrome won because the alternative at that time was Internet Explorer. And it's an excellent thing that it has won.

There are plenty of Chrome based alternatives that are not spyware of you are bothered by that.

That's blatantly untrue.

Firefox won from IE. it successfully broke the IE monopoly and gained significant market share. Then, years later, chrome entered the stage and conquered both.

I don't know in which world you live, but in the world I live common people (that is, non computer nerds) all had Windows and all used Internet Explorer. A few had Firefox or Opera or MacOS, but they were a little minority.

Then came Chrome.

It definitely varied a great deal depending on where you were. There were entire countries with Firefox at 70-80% before Chrome got pushed, though.

there's a cool animation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4wWdmfOibY

Yes, Firefox usage peaked at about 20%: surely not negligible (didn't know anybody myself using it !). As for geographical distribution, I could only find this: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009... The data goes back up to 2009, which was quite a peak period for FF...

Sure FF has played an important role in the browsers war, but it hardly broke the monopoly, or at least it did not do it alone (Safari and Opera started to gain a significative share at the same time).

You can check a ton of stat sites... Firefox was around 30-40% <<global>> market share and growing fast, it was taking over from Internet Explorer.

Firefox was growing constantly before Chrome started taking over.

Those people using Firefox weren't a small minority, and they weren't techies only.

You're trying to rewrite history from your small bubble.

IE usage shrank from 90% to around 60% before Chrome even existed.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Browser_...

> Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows

Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components makes the experience not good.

Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the situation is still way behind everyone else.

I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of times, even though don't use their product, but at least on macos - experience is too bad for me to use it.

[0] https://macpassapp.org/

I'm writing this comment with a screen reader on firefox. Not sure what your issues are, but the accessibility has been rather stable for me after they fixed the quantum disaster.

Interesting. For me, moving with the cursor in most webpages has become extremely slow around half a year ago. I hit cursor down, and braille and speech update after about 1 second. I am on Win10 with JAWS 2022/2023.

Win10, NVDA, no braille. Only difference with the chromium browsers that I've observed is that initially pages take half a second more to load, but it is likely due to the different adblockers I have installed.

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