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A comment on Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit rule. Parent comment

Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by lynx23 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:27AM (#34704835)
No, they are not being mandated. It basically boils down to Jobs declaring that accessibility is an exceiption to ROI. IOW, realising its a kind of social responsibility. Besides, Microsoft took a long time to provide something by default, they let other third parties sell screen readers for big money to poor people. Apple always did both built-in, the API and the screen reader (frontend). Microsoft created Narrator, their own front-end, just a few years ago.
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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by ChickenNugger on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:38AM (#34704900)
My memories of Windows' screen reader telling me "MY ROFLCOPTER GOES SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI" when I was a teen may have exaggerated Microsoft's efforts.

But at least it was there.

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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by idonotknowwhy on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:26PM (#34717206)
Same. Microsoft SAM was fun in high school.

Foreground window untitled notepad Editible text soi soi soi soi soi

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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by serial_dev on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:44AM (#34705304)
I tried to Google what Jobs said about accessibility... I only found what Tim Cook had to say:

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI (...) The company does a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."

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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by lynx23 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:51AM (#34705345)
Cook is just walking the road which has been paved by Jobs...
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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by smoldesu on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:55AM (#34707350)
If only Jobs had the foresight to put other social responsibilities before ROI...
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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by rappr on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:57AM (#34707372)
Because it was Tim Cook that made accessibility a priority, not Steve Jobs.
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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by int_19h on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:58AM (#34705799)
There is still a lot of work for the OS to do to enable those third-party tools. Stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility

It may well be that Apple is special, but in general, large software companies are motivated to care about accessibility primarily by the prospect of lucrative government contracts, for which there are usually mandated (by law) accessibility requirements. The problem for smaller companies is that accessibility doesn't scale down well - you need a lot of upfront investment (education, processes, testing etc) to get anywhere at all at first, but then all that remains useful for many more projects to come.

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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by wizzwizz4 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @08:54AM (#34708012)
And there's still a lot of work for the third-party tools to do, too.

https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-20...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888

https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933

I read somewhere that screen readers look for a flashing vertical line, to detect the caret position in systems that don't expose it via the OS's APIs. I can't find a reference for that right now, though.

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Re:Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Appl... by matwood on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:25AM (#34707115)
> is an exceiption to ROI

I'd argue that accessibility helps everyone, and is thus a positive to ROI. You know those low contrast text/background sites everyone here complains about? Yep, those are not accessible, and probably end up with less readers as a result.

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