Accessible browser/e-mail/html editor found
- From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:12:16 -0500
Hi, all,
Wanted to share this discovery with everyone out there. For some time
now, I've been searching for a jaws-friendly html editor. I've found
two of them, three really, and I wanted to spread the word about them in
case anyone else needs these tools. Best part of it all is that most of
these are free. So, to all those manufacturers out there whose products
are inaccessible, consider yourselves gifted with the bird! The one
I've settled upon offers much more than I bargained for but, in a good
way. It is called Sea Monkey. It's made by Mozilla and is actually a
suite of applications containing seamonkey, a browser, seamonkey e-mail,
and Composer which is an html editor descended from something they had
made some years ago called NVU. The whole thing runs on a Mozilla
engine similar to Firefox. Because of this, I was able to use the
Firefox scripts for Jaws 10 and hit the ground running. I just did a
select all in the Firefox.jss file and copied and pasted the whole thing
minus the comments at the top into the seamonkey.jss file the program
generated. Control+s to compile, alt+tab back to my application and voi
la! It worked like acharm. Best of all? It's free totaly, absolutely,
free. So, if you are tired of outlook 2007 and have a choice in the
matter, download this package and give it a whirl. So far, Jaws reads
it just fine. Anyone who used netscape communications a few years back
will feel right at home since this is a direct descendant of it as it
were. Here are my other picks for Jaws-friendly html editors:
Arachnophelia 4.0: This one is supposed to work with Jaws right out of
the box with no problem. The only thing to worry about is that it was
written in 2001 and html has evolved considerably since then. There is
a more recent version but the guy made it multiplatform and used Java.
Apparently, when he did, he didn't fix it so the accessbridge could
latch on to it and make it so screen readers in windows could read it.
KompoZer: This app is another derivitive of NVU and it's no coincidence
that its name resembles the html editor component in Seamonkey.
Apparently it's the editor that sort of kept the torch alight for a few
years until seamonkey was updated. Works like a word processor. Menus
are accessible, and it just feels like you're in a word processor while
in wisiwyg mode. There's a tags mode and a source mode if you want to
edit the code directly as well. Seamonkey's Composer, that's composer
with a c and an s as opposed to with a k and a z, does the same thing.
Haven't figured out which of the two editors is better yet, they're so
similar. I like the suite version though so I'm sticking with that
since I'm sick and tired of outlook acting crazy on me.
Adobe dreamweaver cs5: This is the only commercial pick I had. i'm
still demoing it in fact. Jaws appears to have no problems with it so
far. It's huge advantage is that it comes with templates and wizzards
and you can edit all sorts of things with it in addition to html. It's
the only truly accessible app I've found so far that can create xml,
html, php, javascript and all that sort of thing.
Apps to watch:
Html kit: This isn't a wisiwyg but it's got all sorts of features. The
menus are not jaws friendly, however. There are reputedly some Jaws
scripts out there for it but the link is broken when you go to download
it from sourceforge, I think it was. Without them, it's very hard to
work with.
Amaya 11.3: This is a browser and editor rolled into one. It's free
and made by the worldwide Web Consortium, the ones who write and say
what constitutes the standards for html code itself. Menu bars are
perfectly accessible, buttons and toolbars are too once autographics
labeler is run. Hotkey navigation is enabled. Trouble is, the actual
content editing area is not. The window class is something called
wx_amaya Canvas. Jaws has absolutely no idea what to make of it. Any
page you edit in notepad from scratch that you then have it open comes
up allright but all the text is rendered into graphics with graphic
numbers. Jaws cursor and pc cursor navigation alike are fruitless.
Virtual cursor doesn't kick in either. Why am I including this?
Because, you see, anytime anyone doing web development wonders what you
have to do to make a webpage acessible to screen reders, they get
referred to the w3c. Anytime standardization issues come up for
accessibility as a hole across all forms of assistive technology, the
w3c's the resource people are refered to. Even Freedom Scientific
refers people to them when they want to make websites accessible. So,
it stands to reason that sooner or later, the very editor of the wc3
will become very accessible to blind users. When will that be? I don't
know. They're close though. It'll have to wait till they do it since I
didn't get the impression freedom scientific was too interested in
tackling the problem when I sent in a suggestion.
That's all for now. I hope someone finds this e-mail useful and
informative. Even if you aren't interested in an html editor, give
seamonkey a try, you might like it just for the broser and e-mail
funtionality. Most of the firefox add-ons seem to work with seamonkey
as well. Incidentally, this e-mail I'm writing, is being composed in
Seamonkey. Haven't had a single Jaws incident and I'm loving it!
Regards,
Alex
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