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<big><blockquote>Mozilla’s mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and '''accessible to all'''. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are '''empowered, safe and independent'''.</blockquote></big>

People with disabilities can experience huge benefits from technology but can also find it frustrating or worse, downright unusable. Mozilla’s Firefox accessibility team is committed to building delivering products and services that are not just usable for people with disabilities, but a delight to use.

The Firefox Accessibility Team accessibility (a11y) team will deliver those delightful experiences by providing top notch AT support across all be spending much of 2021 re-building major pieces of our accessibility engine, the part of Firefox platforms; ensuring that as Firefox architecture and features evolve, accessibility is always included and never an afterthought; and offering web developers great specifications, tools, and features helping them build highly accessible websites powers screen readers and appsother assistive technologies.

Today While the current Firefox offers solid desktop screen reader support with NVDA or JAWS on Windowsa11y engine has served us well for many years, new directions in browser architectures and Orca on Linux; but operating systems coupled with the increasing complexity of the modern web means that some of Firefox has almost no support for VoiceOver on Mac. In 2020 the team will deliver full support for VoiceOver on Mac beginning with a preview for developers around mid-year and 's venerable a11y engine needs a consumer-ready feature set by year’s endrebuild.

Solid screen reader support is niceBrowsers, including Firefox, once simple single process applications, have become complex multi-process systems that have to move lots of data between processes, but stellar screen reader support is even betterwhich can cause performance slowdowns. In 2020 order to ensure the best performance and stability and to enable support for a growing, wider variety of accessibility tools in the future (such as Windows Narrator, Speech Recognition and Text Cursor Indicator), Firefox Accessibility Team will tackle 's accessibility engine needs to be more robust and versatile. And where ATs used to spend significant resources ensuring a collection great experience across browsers, the dominance of text bugs one particular browser means less resources being committed to ensuring the ATs work well with Firefox. This changing landscape means that Firefox too must evolve significantly and other cases that may not completely fail but can definitely frustrate AT users's what we're going to be doing in 2021.

On The most important part of this rebuild of the Firefox accessibility engine is what we're calling "cache the mobile frontworld". Today, when an accessibility client wants to access web content, Firefox often has to send a request from its UI process to the Team web content process. Only a small amount of information is working towards maintained in the UI process for faster response. Aside from the launch overhead of the next-generation Firefox for Android browserthese requests, codenamed Fenixthis can cause significant responsiveness problems, with fast particularly if an accessibility client accesses many elements in the accessibility tree. The architecture we're implementing this year will ameliorate these problems by sending the entire accessibility tree from the web content process to the UI process and accurate TalkBack integration keeping it up to date, ensuring that will be a great experience for new users and an a11y upgrade for users migrating from accessibility clients have the legacy Android Firefoxfastest possible response to their requests regardless of their complexity.

Not quite as visible So that's the biggest lift we're planning for 2021 but critically important, in 2020 that's not all we'll be doing. Firefox is always adding new features and adjusting existing features and the Team accessibility team will be working to ensure spending significant effort ensuring that all of the Firefox accessibility APIchanges are accessible. And we know we’re not perfect today so we’ll also be working through our backlog of defects, which powers screen readers prioritizing and other assistive technology, will be “fission” ready. Fission is fixing the issues that cause the Mozilla project to re-architect Firefox, isolating each website in its own computer process most severe problems for improved securityusers with disabilities. The Firefox Accessibility Team will also work closely with the Desktop and Mobile Firefox front-end teams Additionally, we’ll be standing up more automated accessibility testing to help ensure that every new browser feature that ships work is delightfully always accessible.

ItFirefox has a long history of providing great experiences for disabled people. To continue that legacy, we're spending most of our resources this year on rebuilding core pieces of technology supporting those experiences. That means we won't have the resources to tackle some issues we'd like to, but another piece of Firefox's not enoughlong history is that, howeverthrough open source and open participation, to make Firefox accessible and delightful for people with disabilitiesyou can help. Our mission compels us to This year, we can especially use your help make the web itself accessible and delightful too[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug. We will accomplish this in 2020 with improvements and feature additions to our accessibility developer toolscgi?bug_type=defect&component=Disability%20Access&product=Firefox identifying any new issues that take away from your experience as a disabled Firefox user], deeper participation in the web standards processfixing [https://mzl.la/2O9DwQ4 high priority bugs that affect large numbers of disabled Firefox users], and implementation of new specifications in [https://getfirefox.com spreading the word] about the Gecko areas where Firefox excels as a browser engine that powers websites and apps in for disabled users. Together, we can make 2021 a great year for Firefoxaccessibility.