Broadening Our Impact

Last year, the accessibility team worked to identify and fix gaps in our screen reader support, as well as on some new areas of focus, like improving Firefox for users with low vision. As a result, we shipped some great features. In addition, we’ve begun building awareness across Mozilla and putting in place processes to help ensure delightful accessibility going forward, including a Firefox wide triage process.

With a solid foundation for delightful accessibility well underway, we’re looking at the next step in broadening our impact: expanding our engagement with our passionate, global community. It’s our hope that we can get to a place where a broad community of interested people become active participants in the planning, design, development and testing of Firefox accessibility. To get there, the first step is open communication about what we’re doing and where we’re headed.

To that end, we’ve created this blog to keep you all informed about what’s going on with Firefox accessibility. As a second step, we’ve published the Firefox Accessibility Roadmap. This document is intended to communicate our ongoing work, connecting the dots from our aspirations, as codified in our Mission and Manifesto, through our near term strategy, right down to the individual work items we’re tackling today. The roadmap will be updated regularly to cover at least the next six months of work and ideally the next year or so.

Another significant area of new documentation, pushed by Eitan and Morgan, is around our ongoing work to bring VoiceOver support to Firefox on macOS. In addition to the overview wiki page, which covers our high level plan and specific lists of bugs we’re targeting, there’s also a work in progress architectural overview and a technical guide to contributing to the Mac work.

We’ve also transitioned most of our team technical discussions from a closed Mozilla Slack to the open and participatory Matrix instance. Some exciting conversations are already happening and we hope that you’ll join us.

And that’s just the beginning. We’re always improving our documentation and onboarding materials so stay tuned to this channel for updates. We hope you find access to the team and the documents useful and that if something in our docs calls out to you that you’ll find us on Matrix and help out, whether that’s contributing ideas for better solutions to problems we’re tackling, writing code for features and fixes we need, or testing the results of development work.

We look forward to working with you all to make the Firefox family of products and services the best they can be, a delight to use for everyone, especially people with disabilities.