Accessibility works: enhancing web accessibility in Firefox

Authors:
John T. Richards;Vicki L. Hanson;Jonathan P. Brezin;Calvin B. Swart;Susan Crayne;Mark R. Laff
Affiliations:
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY
Venue:
UAHCI'07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Universal access in human-computer interaction: applications and services
Year:
2007

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Abstract

This paper reviews several techniques we have discovered while trying to extend the Firefox browser to support people with visual, motor, reading, and cognitive disabilities. Our goal throughout has been to find ways to make on-the-fly transformations of Web content including adjustments of text and image size, text style, line and letter spacing, text foreground color, text background color, page background removal, content linearization, and reading text aloud. In this paper, we focus primarily on the changes we make to the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) to transform Web content. We review the kinds of approaches we have used to make DOM modifications sufficiently fast and error free. We highlight the problems posed by Web pages with a mix of static and dynamic content generated by client-side scripts and by Web pages that use both fixed and relative placement of page elements, pages of the sort we expect to see in increasingly in the future.