The first steps were to build tools for reverse engineering the under-documented macOS and VoiceOver APIs. In February, the team started work in earnest. Three members of the accessibility engineering team, Morgan, Eitan, and Marco, put together a one year plan to deliver solid VoiceOver screen reader support on macOS. Mac was the one major Firefox platform that simply wasn’t accessible to blind users.Īt the beginning of 2020, we set out to fix that. There were a couple of efforts to get Firefox working with VoiceOver but it never reached a usable state. About 15 years ago, Apple introduced a built-in screen reader to macOS called VoiceOver. And on iOS, Firefox users can work with the built-in VoiceOver screen reader. On Android, Firefox users have their pick of Google’s Talkback or Samsung’s Voice Assistant. On Linux, Firefox works with the Orca screen reader. On Windows, Firefox supports the two most popular screen readers, NVDA and JAWS. While we’ve worked to ensure that people with a wide range of disabilities can participate on the web, much of our engineering effort has been focused on improvements for screen readers, an assistive technology that allows blind users to engage with computers through synthesized speech or a braille display. For the better part of two decades, Mozilla has been building browsers that are highly accessible for users with disabilities.

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