The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.

Mozilla invests in accessibility, because it’s the right thing to do.
We have staff, a team of engineers, who exclusively focus on accessibility in our products and play a positive influence in the general accessibility of the web. This has paid off well, Firefox is well regarded as a leader in screen reader support on the desktop and on Android. We have the best HTML5 accessibility support in our browser, and we are close to having a fully functional screen reader in Firefox OS.

I say “close”, because we are not yet there. Most websites are fairly accessible with little to no effort from the site developers. The document model of the web is relatively simple and is malleable enough that blind users are able to access them through screen readers. Advanced web applications are a whole other story, developers are required to be much more mindful about how they are authored and account for users with disabilities when designing them. The most recognized standard for making accessible rich internet application is called ARIA (accessible rich internet applications), and it allows augmenting markup with attributes that will help assistive technologies (such as screen readers) have a good understanding of the state of the app, and relay it to the user.
In Firefox OS we have a suite of core apps called Gaia that is the foundation for Firefox OS’s user interface. It is really one giant web app, perhaps one of the biggest out there. Since our mission dictates that we make our products accessible, we have embarked on that journey, we created a screen reader for Firefox OS, and we got to work in making Gaia screen-reader friendly. It has been a long and sisyphean process, where we would arrive at one module in gaia, learn the code, fix some issues, and move on to the next module. It feels something like this:

Firefox OS has grown tremendously in a couple of years. Things never slowed down, and we were always revamping one app or another, trying out something new, and evolving rapidly. This means that accessibility was always one step behind. If we got an app accessible in version n, n+1 was around the corner with a whole new everything. Besides working on Gaia, we have always been looping back to our screen reader, making it more robust and adding features. We have consistently been straddling the gap:

Firefox OS has achieved some amazing milestones in its short life. Early in the project, there was still a hushed uncertainty. Did we over promise? Could we turn a proof of concept into a mass-market device? There were so many moving parts for a version one release. Accessibility was not a product priority.

The return on investment

When I think about making our products accessible for the people that can’t see or to help a kid with autism, I don’t think about a bloody ROI.

Take 5 seconds, and let that sink in. Apple is not a charity, they are one of the most profitable companies on the planet. Still, they understand the social value of making their products accessible.
Yet, I will argue that there is a bloody return on investment in accessibility.
Mobile is changing our social perception on disability and blurring the line between permanent and temporary barriers. The prevailing assumption used to be that your user will sit in front of a 14″ monitor with a keyboard, mouse and an undivided attention. But today there can be no assumptions, an app needs to be usable in many situations that impair the user in comparison to a desktop setup:

• A user will browse the web on a small, 3.5″ device with no keyboard, and only their inaccurate fat fingers as a pointing device for activating links.
• A driver will need to keep their eyes on the road and cannot interact with complex interfaces.
• A cyclist on a cold winter day will have gloves and will want to look up where they are going on a map.
• A pedestrian will look up a nearby restaurant on a sunny day with plenty of glare making it hard to read their phone’s screen.

The edge case of permanently impaired users is eclipsed by the common mobile use case which needs to appeal to users with all sorts of temporal impairments: motor, visual and cognitive. Apple understands that with Siri, and Google does too with Google Now. In Firefox OS, sooner or later we will need a good voice input/output story.
I made a case for accessibility, and I could probably stop here. But I won’t. Because the real benefit of an accessible device is priceless.

We all benefit from that smart phone in our pocket. The first iPhone was a real revolution. It allows us to check mail on the go, share our lives on social networks, ignore our family, and pretend like we we are doing something important in awkward parties. But for blind users, smart phones have increased their quality of life in profound and amazing ways. Blind smart phone owners are more independent, less isolated. and they can participate in online life like never before. Prior to smart phones, blind folks depended on very expensive gadgets for mobile computing. Today, a smart phone with a few handy apps could easily replace a $10,000 specialty device.
Smart phones in the hands of blind users is a very big deal.

What we need to do

To make this happen, every decision by our product team, every design from UX, and every line of code from developers needs to account for the blind user experience. This isn’t as big a deal as it sounds, screen readers support is just another thing to account for, like localization. We know today that designing and developing UI for right-to-left languages take some consideration. Especially if you live in a left-to-right world.
What we need is project-wide consciousness around accessibility. It is great that we have an accessibility team, and I think Mozilla benefits from it. But this does not let anyone else off the hook from understanding accessibility, embedding it in our products, and embracing it as a value.
I fear that this post will disappoint because I won’t get into how blind users use smart phones, and how should developers account for the screen reader. I have written in the past about this, and Yura has some good posts on that as well. And yes, we need to step up our game, document and communicate more.
But for now, here are two things you could do to get a better picture:

1. If you own an Android device or iPhone, turn on the screen reader, close your eyes and learn to use it. Challenge yourself to complete all sorts of tasks with your screen reader on. Test the screen readers limits.
2. With your Firefox OS device, turn on the screen reader. It works in the same fashion as the iOS or Android one does. Check your latest creation, and see what is broken and missing.

2015 is going to be a great year for Firefox OS. I have already heard all sorts of product ideas that have the potential of greatness. We are destined to ship something amazing. But for bind users, it could be life changing.

An understated feature in desktop Firefox is the option to suppress the text and background colors that content authors choose for us, and instead go with the plain old black on white with a smattering of blue and purple links. In other words, 1994.
Why is this feature great? Because it hands control back to the user and allows people with visual impairments to tweak things just enough to make the web readable.
Somebody once asked on the #accessibility IRC channel why they can’t turn off content colors in Firefox for Android. So it seemed like a good idea to re-introduce that option in the form of an extension. There are a few color related addons in AMO, but I just submitted another one, and you could get it here. This is what the toggle option looks like:

[](/assets/uploads/2014/10/screen.png)

Since the color attribute was introduced, the web has evolved a lot. We really can’t go back to the, naive, monochrome days of the 90s. Many sites use background images and colors in novel ways, and use backgrounds to portray important information. Sometimes disabling page colors will really break things. So once you remove colors from AMO, you get:

[](/assets/uploads/2014/10/screen2.png)

As you can see, it isn’t perfect, but it does make the text more readable to some. Having a menu item that doesn’t take too much digging to find will hopfully help folks go back and forth between the two modes and gt the best out of both worlds.

You’re welcome.

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In my case, I have a 3D printer, and every problem is an opportunity to stare at the hypnotic movements of the extruder.
It has a nifty hinge/magnet mechanism, here is a video:

You could download and print this via the thingiverse page, or you could check out the github repo and hack on it.
Some lucky duck has me as a Secret Dino, and will be getting this in the mail soon!

Anyone who comes from a pita-rich country to North America knows that you really can’t get your hands on good pita here. I came across a recipe in Hebrew that is really good, and makes fantastic doughy pitas with nice pockets.
You need:

• 1 kg of white all-purpose flour
• 700 g warm water
• 2 tbsp salt
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp + 1 tsp yeast
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• pizza stone

In a large bowl, sift in the flour and mix all the dry ingredients (salt, sugar, yeast) until it is all evenly distributed. Add the olive oil, and half the the warm water. Start mixing with a spoon, and add the rest of the water slowly.
Now it’s time to get dirty (if you haven’t gotten flower on everything already). With a wet hand, reach into the bowl, and knead the dough in a twisting fashion, as if you were screwing a light bulb. If the business gets sticky, re-wet your hand as many times as needed. Does your arm hurt yet? Good. Keep twist-kneading, and switch directions every once in a while. Do this for 10 minutes.
Set the bowl aside, and let the dough rise for an hour and a half until it doubles in size.
Put pizza stone in oven and preheat it to its max temperature, my oven goes to 550 degrees F. The dough, once risen should be very airy and wet. This is good! Spill it out to a floured work surface and get control over it with flour. Now use a knife to split the dough into 16 balls. Flatten each ball with a rolling pin to create flat circles.
Baking time! Each pita will need about 2 or 3 minutes, not more. If you are seeing any browning you are a few seconds late. You should see the pita puff up and get a pocket. I managed to bake two at a time, and have a huge basket filled with fresh pita in about 15 minutes.