live.gnome.org

Firefox 3.0 Live Region support in Orca

• Description: Firefox Live Region support in Orca.

• Summary: Under development. Works well with most test pages, however, real world pages are currently rare if not non-existent. Please see below for an interim solution.

Details

What are Live Regions?

Live regions are parts of a web page that the web page author expects to change dynamically. Examples of live regions include tables with dynamically updated content (sports stats, stock information), logs where new information is being added (chat transcript logs), notification areas (status, alerts), and many other possibilities. Many such sites exist for the sighted user. However, providing fully accessible web pages that utilize Live Regions has been more of a challenge. These challenges are being addressed by the W3C and Mozilla developers. The results of this work have yielded FireVox, an early adopter of this technology, and this initial offering of Live Region support in Orca.

Installing and updating Orca

Live Region support in Orca has been committed to the main trunk of the Orca repository and will appear in the GNOME 2.21.4 Development Release. Please refer to the Downloading and Installing Orca section for information on building and installing Orca from the latest sources.

After the install completes, you must quit and then restart Orca for new changes to take effect. You should periodically insure that your version of Orca is kept up to date by repeating the steps outlined above.

Installing and updating Firefox 3.0

Live regions are supported in the latest versions of Firefox 3.0. Please refer to our Firefox installation instructions for information on how to update Firefox.

Monitoring Live Regions in Firefox 3.0 with Orca

Key Commands

• Firefox keyboard commands

• Orca Firefox specific keyboard commands

• Orca keyboard commands

The following is a list of Live Region specific Orca commands:

Note: Set the module level variable 'inferLiveRegions' in settings.py to 'False' to completely disable live region support by default.

Known Live Region Containing Websites

Note: Unless noted, all comments about Orca support are in reference to the truck version of Orca with no use of Greasemonkey.

Finance

Sports

Chat

Please feel free to edit this page if a known site is not listed or email the details to scott@bashautomation.com and I will add it for you.

Greasemonkey Scripts

Summary

Live region support currently suffers from the fact that web developers do not want to add the required additional markup if there is no technology to take advantage of it. Hopefully, web developers will begin adopting the new ARIA markup standards now that Live Region support is available in Orca. In the interim period, Greasemonkey scripts might be a solution to help garner support in the Orca user community with regards to Live Regions. This in turn should help pressure web developers to provide the necessary markup (and hopefully not rely on someone writing a Greasemonkey script).

As described on the Greasemonkey add-on site, Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using small bits of JavaScript. This technique can be used to 'inject' proper ARIA Live Region markup into a 'live' page that has not been properly marked up. This, in turn, will allow Firefox to provide the proper events to Orca.

Note: Support no ARIA Live Region markup should alleviate the use of Greasemonkey on many sites. However, Greasemonkey will always be a tool to make up for any deficiencies in the HTML markup, most notably for adding labels and descriptions to Live Regions

Greasemonkey Installation

The release version of Greasemonkey is only compatible with Firefox 1.5 - 2.0.0.*. A unsigned version that works for Firefox 3.0 can be found here. First, save the file to disk and then open the file with Firefox. Next, select 'Install' on the dialog that appears. Firefox will need to be restarted once the installation is complete.

Greasemonkey Scripts

Bug Tracking

This section is reserved for links to relevant Live Region bugs and requests for enhancements.

• Original Orca Live Region Request for Enhancement committed to trunk

• Support no ARIA Live Region markup committed to trunk

• Live region performance enhancements committed to trunk

• Support relevant and channel live region properties

See also the Mozilla Bugs page for a list of Mozilla bugs that prevent Orca from doing as good a job as it could do.

Other Resources

• Mozilla Developer Center's report on AJAX:WAI ARIA Live Regions

• Charles Chen's Live Region test cases.

• W3C Specification.

• Best Practices.