The developers of Firefox and Thunderbird have
intentionally made their programs accessible. Part of doing
so on an ongoing basis is to take the affirmative action of
recruiting blind people to test new builds of these
programs. Not doing so is not implementing what is
expedcted in terms of making programs properly accessible on
an ongoing basis.
If they don’t do this, and if other developers don’t do
this who have expressed an interest or willingness to make
their programs accessible, such as the developers of Malware
Bytes, blind people should contact them and try to get them
to do this.
Brian Vogel
<britechguy@...> wrote:
> My point, which seems to have eluded you, is that I
constantly see complaints about issues, but when I (or you,
or anyone else) bring up the fact that you must report them
if you want to have any hope of their being resolved there
is generally nothing but the proverbial crickets in
response.
This is likely because too many screen reader users have
seen the, sorry but I can't duplicate this. Next! Message in
response. In addition, there are some larger issues.
Much of the accessibility stack is integrated into the
frameworks needed to build the applications; coders of the
actual applications built within the framework itself rarely
go out of their way to make their appications accessible.
That their apps built with the framework are accessible is a
happy coincidence. In other words the fact that Firefox and
Thunderbird are largely accessible with screen readers is
not necessarily due to someone at Mozilla going, hmm, lets
open up NVDA/Jaws/whatever and see how this new feature
works--although organizations like Mozilla
<em>do</em> in fact have some a11y testers. I
don't know how many programmers are actually screen reader
users there, however. But anyway the accessibility support
is there because the coding frameworks they use to construct
the applications have basic accessibility built in to them.
witness such browsers as Pale Moon, which have this
infrastructure removed and which are almost completely
unusable with screen readers.
Speaking in general about bug reporting. When you report an
issue about an application not working with your screen
reader, it is likely you're going to get a, wow, I didn't
know about screen readers, response. Because the developers
did not know their applications could be used at all by us.
Then, you'll either get responses that fall into three
categories:
1. Sorry, but I don't know anything about screen readers, so
I don't know what to do to fix it. Thank you for your
support.
2. Well, let's see if we can make it work. What do I need to
do to make this thing work with your ... screen reader?
3. Crickets.
In category one, you're pretty much out of luck. In category
two, unless you know about programming there's not much you
can do either. And of course in ccategory three, again, out
of luck.
This is a basic summary of why a lot of screen reader users
don't report bugs. Yes, doing so may be helpful in a lot of
cases, ut in most of them, it can be a futile exercise.
