Firefox generally doesn’t let you use a lot of OS X’s accessibility features, including the services menu and some of OS X’s regular keyboard shortcuts. One effect of this is that really easy method for speaking the highlighted text when you press a key doesn’t work.
The Firefox extension SpeakingFox fills this gap with some nifty context menu options which pass the currently highlighted text to OS X’s default speech engine.
SpeakingFox presents its options via the context menu
If you don’t highlight any text, selecting “Start speaking text” will just speak the word currently under the cursor. As you’d expect, “Stop speaking” halts any speech currently going on.
This extension doesn’t make Firefox into a fully accessible web browser for a blind person – for that you’ll need to use an accessible browser, or a much more complicated extension such as FireVox. But for most of us who just need long sections spoken, and can highlight them with a mouse, SpeakingFox is just perfect.
- Ricky Buchanan
atmacjournal February 26, 2010 at 2:14 pm
New ATMac post: SpeakingFox: Tell Firefox To Talk http://bit.ly/cDVoKV
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larskarlsson February 26, 2010 at 6:32 pm
http://icio.us/1qlm52
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steno February 26, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Firefox Text-to-Speech Add-Ons – SpeakingFox: http://bit.ly/cDVoKV FireVox: http://www.firevox.clcworld.net/ via @sprungmarkers #a11y #addons
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YamaguchiToshi February 28, 2010 at 5:53 pm
SpeakingFox Makes Firefox Talk | ATMac http://ow.ly/1c5RT
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Steve Lee March 1, 2010 at 6:21 am
A really cool cross-browser and cross-platform tool that will also do this is TechDisTOolbar
http://access.ecs.soton.ac.uk/projects/toolbar
It can even be added to a website.
Actually Firefox is a VERY accessible browser. What you need is a screen reader that knows how to work with it. That is covered really well on Linux and Windows, but I’m not sure about OS X. I do know that the Firefox accessibility team have often tried to improve Mac Accessibility and even looked to hire someone. If anyone one wants to know more or has information then you can drop them a line.
http://www.mozilla.org/access
You can also look at
Ricky Buchanan March 2, 2010 at 6:02 pm
@Steve: Firefox doesn’t work with OS X’s screen reader, as we’ve discussed several times on this blog, and also doesn’t generally follow the OS X accessibility API for controls/etc. so on OS X specifically it’s not that accessible. It’s good on other platforms and that’s great, but being an OS X blog I’m writing about this.
leejohnsonseo March 2, 2010 at 4:21 pm
This is good: SpeakingFox: Tell Firefox To Talk – http://bit.ly/bK5Ivh
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bgilormini March 3, 2010 at 6:03 am
reading the latest from ATMac about speaking firefox http://icio.us/twdb4r
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Matthew Smith March 3, 2010 at 9:06 am
How accessible is Camino? That’s a Gecko-based browser which uses the Cocoa API, unlike Firefox which seems to use its own GUI library (or am I years out of date?). I know Camino doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Firefox but it also cuts down the bloat.