Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

JAWS Screenreader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox

Filed under: Science and Technology — Daniel Lemire @ 22:29

From Catherine Roy, I learned that there is now a screenreader for Mozilla Firefox. This is an essential tool for visual impaired Web surfers. The adaptation to Firefox is a GPL but JAWS itself is a commercial (Windows-only?) tool.

What do visually impaired Linux users do? I know KDE has an accessibility initiative, but how does it compare with the Windows or Mac universe? Are there screenreaders for Firefox under Linux? I suspect that Linux (or even Mac) is probably behind in this respect?

Update: it looks like Fire Vox could be a better alternative.

4 Comments »

  1. From what I know, other OS’s are behind when compared to windows.[it's sad, but true], The mozilla plugin scripts package doesn’t work as well as say internet exploder, I mean explorer, how silly of me. I’d love to switch but right now, it’s not posible. I remember hearing that the devs for that package contacted freedomscientific the makers of jaws
    http://www.hj.com
    but were eather ignored, or shot down. Bad fs… WindowEyes support of mozilla is the clossest we got to firefox
    http://www.gwmicro.com
    it’s only accessible if you use the sweet, and it, again isn’t as good of a screen reader as jaws.

    Comment by serrebi101 — 19/2/2005 @ 19:39

  2. Has anyone tried Fire Vox?
    http://clc-4-tts.cjb.net/
    It’s a screen reader plugin for Firefox - basically it’s like having JAWS inside Firefox except it’s free! Unfortunately, it relies on SAPI5 so it is currently Windows only, but on the bright side, the author claims that he can support other OS once he switches to a Java-based speech engine.

    Comment by Johnny R. — 28/3/2005 @ 15:00

  3. Thanks a lot ofr the Fire Vox link!!!

    Comment by Daniel Lemire — 28/3/2005 @ 17:00

  4. Woohoo!

    There’s been an update to the Fire Vox site and the author is saying that it works on Mac and Linux now. I just tried it on a Mac OS X Powerbook and it works! The default key assignment seems to be bit problematic on the Mac, but reconfiguring them with the Fire Vox options menu did the trick for me.

    Comment by Johnny R. — 16/6/2005 @ 9:01

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