Firefox 4 beta - AT Vender Relief

Success. Earlier this month I posted an alert about the temporary Windows screen reader bustage with our Firefox 4 betas. Since then Marco posted a status update about our temporary and long term fixes. We worked together, along with the screen reader developers to provide 3 solutions. The first is a temporary hack, and the other two are long term fixes and probably generally useful anyway:

1. The "emulation" hack. For known AT that require them, we resurrected the windows that were recently removed from Firefox. We intend to only create these windows for legacy AT so that users don't necessarily need to pay for upgrades for their software to use Firefox 4.
2. The speedy document accessors fix. We added quick methods to get parent and child documents, and indexed access to documents.
3. The QueryService fix. Provide a special service ID for getting the accessible object that represents the browser tab content document that contains the accessible object queried. Here's some sample code to illustrate how you might use this service:

static const GUID SID_IAccessibleContentDocument = {0xa5d8e1f3,0x3571,0x4d8f,0x95,0x21,0x07,0xed,0x28,0xfb,0x07,0x2e};

// Assuming you have a CComPtr<IAccessible> accessible
CComQIPtr<IServiceProvider> serviceProvider = accessible;
CComPtr<IAccessible> accessibleDoc;
serviceProvider->QueryService(SID_IAccessibleContentDocument, IID_IAccessible, ( void**) &accessibleDoc);

If the 'accessible' is in web content then 'accessibleDoc' represents the main content document that contains 'accessible'. It works in all cases we tested, including special documents like about:addons, as well as documents with iframes where we still always return the main content document. This support is in our nightly builds and will come with FF4 beta7. I hope this will make it easier to manage your cache and context switching.

Thanks for reading.