[macvoiceover] Re: Fw: Article on Firefox and VoiceOver

Actually, I'm relatively surprised at this article.
For several reasons, but foremost, I had no idea mozilla was working so hard for general accessibility capabilities on multiple operating systems. 
That's great to know.
As for a secondary screen reader on osx, there's nothing at all preventing anyone from making one, since all of the base system source is available in the darwin project. I have no idea how much work it would be to port one of the existing screen readers to darwin, but once that's done, there's nothing to prevent it from being used on osx afterwords, and since open darwin needs a screen reader anyhow, I honestly think this would be an excellent use of resources. Failing that, someone who is better at disassembling code than I am can easily obtain all the information necessary to have their screen reader get the same info voice over does, simply by writing small modules that talk to the screen reader core apis, and see what info they get back. After several of these modules are put together, and worked over to provide complete access, you could (in effect) reverse engineer the voiceover screen reader component. (this is how I got nearly all of the utilities I wrote for the artic technology notetakers written) It's a long and drawn out process, frustrating at times, and of course, will (likely) find unknown bugs with the technology (I found one with artics book reader application this way) but the positive side is, it will eventually work. Redhat did this with windows as well, when adding samba support into their linux distribution. This is likely the only approach that will give satisfactory results with the existing technology (meaning voiceover) but again, there's nothing saying this approach couldn't be used to build a secondary screen reader that conforms to the needs of the mozilla community. All the apis are there, documented (mostly) and available for anyone to use. Someone with sufficient knowledge, time, and programming capabilities could easily (ok, maybe not easily), produce a 3rd-party application that could talk to mozilla, then filter the results back to voiceover for the actual speaking, while simply calling the vo routines to perform any additional speaking that may be necessary on the parts of the interface that vo doesn't/can't handle on it's own. Admittedly, it's not a simple fix, and it will take time, but it is possible, and if there is enough demand, this is likely the approach that will have to be taken. Could I do this? Not likely, although I'm a relatively decent programmer when it comes to normal everyday tasks, I don't have the knowledge necessary to tie apple interfacing into the mix, nor could I do so even if I did know how, because (as pointed out here in this article) apple still has a bit to go for complete accessibility, and it's developer tools make it possible, but extremely difficult (though considerably easier than it used to be) for a blind programmer to develop an entire product from ed to end w/o sighted assistance, and in my case, that assistance just isn't available. I could of course, test, add patches, and perform other tasks required to ensure smooth operations, but this task is a bit beyond me, or I'd be perfectly happy to volunteer for it.
But, in any case, I agree, that something definitely needs done on this front, as I said, I had no idea mozilla was working so hard on the behalf of accessibility. Now I need to go take a look at their site, and see if I can contribute somehow. :) 



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