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The most important part of this rebuild of the Firefox accessibility engine is what we're calling "cache the world". Today, when an accessibility client wants to access web content, Firefox often has to send a request from its UI process to the web content process. Only a small amount of information is maintained in the UI process for faster response. Aside from the overhead of these requests, this can cause significant responsiveness problems, 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 keeping it up to date, ensuring that accessibility clients have the fastest possible response to their requests regardless of their complexity.
So that's the biggest lift we're planning for 2021 but that's not all we'll be doing. Firefox is always adding new features and adjusting existing features and the accessibility team will be spending significant effort ensuring that all of the Firefox changes are accessible. And we know we’re not perfect today so we’ll also be working through our backlog of defects, prioritizing and fixing the issues that cause the most severe problems for users with disabilities. Additionally, we’ll be standing up more automated accessibility testing to help ensure new work is always accessible.
Firefox 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 long history is that, through open source and open participation, you can help. This year, we can especially use your help [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?bug_type=defect&component=Disability%20Access&product=Firefox identifying any new issues that take away from your experience as a disabled Firefox user], fixing [https://mzl.la/2O9DwQ4 high priority bugs that affect large numbers of disabled Firefox users], and [https://getfirefox.com spreading the word] about the areas where Firefox excels as a browser for disabled users. Together, we can make 2021 a great year for Firefox accessibility.
