Stanford Online Accessibility Program

Firefox/Mozilla Extensions

Given the relative ease of writing Firefox extensions, it's not surprising that many have emerged for developers to use while creating web content. These extensions are all useful during the development or repair phase of your content creation. Check back regularly as new extensions surface with regular frequency.

Colour Contrast Analyser - Firefox Extension 0.2: http://juicystudio.com/article/colour-contrast-analyser-firefox-extension.php

The Colour Contrast Analyser Firefox extension lists color combinations used in the document in a table that summarizes the foreground color, background color, luminosity contrast ratio, and the colour difference and brightness difference used in the algorithm suggested in the 26th of April 2000 working draft for Accessibility Evaluation and Repair Tools (AERT). Each element is also listed with its parent elements, and class and id attribute values when specified to make it easier to locate the elements.

Accessibar: http://accessibar.mozdev.org/

Accessibar is a toolbar extension for the Mozilla browser which aims at providing various accessibility features for users who could benefit from them. These features primarily focus on the dynamic manipulation of the visual display of the web page in addition to the integration of a text to speech reader which can read out loud the browser's user interface as well as web page content.

HTML Validator (based on Tidy): http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

HTML Validator is an Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation to Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page. Instant feedback, the view source highlights where your problems are, and, using Tidy, allows you to fix them. Excellent!

Sharkware - JAWS Screen Reader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/s2s/latest/jaws1/home/index.shtml

At long last, JAWS users can now surf the web with the Firefox browser. An Open Source release from the University of Texas Accessibility Institute, this project has resulted in a JAWS script and a Firefox extension that enable JAWS to function with Mozilla Firefox in a similar manner to how JAWS functions with Internet Explorer.

Web Developer's Toolbar: http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Another great tool to add to the arsenal. Developed by Chris Pederick, this extension to Mozilla / Firefox provides a comprehensive toolbar for running quick tests on pretty much everything.

Checky: http://checky.mozdev.org

A wonderful tool to add right-click functionality to Mozilla / Firefox for Windows and Linux; sorry, no Mac version yet...

PlaceNameHere Toolbar: http://placenamehere.com/pnhtoolbar/

Another Mozilla / Firefox extension created by Chris Casciano that provides a lot of functionality including hotlinks to documentation and validation services.

Longdesc: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/273/

Adds "View Image Longdesc: ..." to the image context menu (obviously only if the image element does have a longdesc attribute set).

FoxyVoice: http://foxyvoice.kenche.info/

FoxyVoice is a Firefox extension that provides text-to-speech functionality using Microsoft Win32 Speech API (SAPI). With FoxyVoice you can listen to the page being read aloud, although it lacks the functionality of a true Screen Reader or Speech Browser. Still in development.

Fangs: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2004/11/22/8

Another Mozilla / Firefox extension for the Windows platform. Fangs creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by one of the modern screen readers. (Still in early development, but may prove to be very useful, especially in teaching/seminar environments.)

Accessibility Extensions for Mozilla http://firefox.cita.illinois.edu/

accessibilityext.xpi adds features to Mozilla / Firefox to make it easier for people to view and navigate web content based on the structural markup used to create the web page. It can be used by authors to check their structural markup to make sure it matches the actual content structure of the resource.

Acc - an Accessibility Evaluator http://appro.mit.jyu.fi/tools/acc/

Acc - an Accessibility Evaluator tries to do what other evaluators can't do. It includes basic explicit test for HTML, but also includes features like

• Visual layout extraction implementation
• Basic scalability test
• Deeply nested layout tables test
• Skip to Main Content link check
• Navigation consistency check compared to previous page
• Scripted page evaluation

Section 508 - Accessibility Toolbar: http://www.rampweb.com/Accessibility_Resources/Section508/download.asp

The purpose of the toolbar is to provide a tool that can assist you in the manual process of checking for U.S. Section 508 compliance of Web sites and Web applications. It has some interesting options I've not seen in other toolbars, including the ability to test "Readability" and some of the document information that it can provide (file sizes, etc.).

Mouseless Brousing: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/879

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) means id-based browsing. Major goal of this extension is to enable browsing only by using the numpad keys. Mouseless browsing is based on marking all links, form elements and frames with ids. You can then trigger an action (e.g. following the link) by simply entering the id and depending on the configuration confirming it by pressing Enter.

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