[Accessibility_sig] New version of Fire Vox, the open source Firefox screen reader. Mac support added!

[CLC4TTS]

Greetings everyone. I just wanted to let everyone know that I have a new 
version of Fire Vox out that is cross OS compatible. In addition to 
Windows, it now works on Mac and Linux as well. This was accomplished by 
adding a second TTS engine as a possible option - FreeTTS, a Java based 
text to speech engine, is now supported. I have personally tried and 
tested it on Mac OS X and found it to work. Users have mailed me reports 
saying that it also works on Linux.

I presented an earlier version of Fire Vox at the SXSW Knowbility booth 
a few months ago. For those of you who missed that presentation, Fire 
Vox is an extension that transforms Firefox into a self-voiced talking 
browser that does not require a separate screen reader such as JAWS. The 
only requirements are Firefox and some text to speech engine, either 
SAPI 5 (included in Windows 2000 and Windows XP) or FreeTTS (a free, 
open source Java based TTS that can be used on Windows, Mac, and Linux). 
Like other tools such as JAWS, it will do more than just read the 
content on a web page. It also identifies elements (headings, links, 
images, etc), provides support for form controls (echoes keys as they 
are typed, identifies if radio buttons/checkboxes are checked or not, 
etc), reads the menus on the browser and JavaScript alert boxes, and 
gives quick access to the various elements via lists of headings, links, 
images, form elements, access keys, and frames on a page. Unlike JAWS, 
Fire Vox also supports MathML objects embedded on a page, and it's a 
freeware, open source project.  

Fire Vox is part of the CLC-4-TTS suite, a set of freeware, open source 
extensions that aim to make Firefox more accessible by providing 
extension developers with JavaScript libraries designed for accessiblity 
(such as library functions for speaking a string of text, retrieving all 
the elements on a page with a given attribute like access keys for 
instance, etc).

Fire Vox (and the rest of the CLC-4-TTS suite that is needed to run it) 
can be downloaded at:
http://clc-4-tts.cjb.net/

-Charles, the creator of Fire Vox and the CLC-4-TTS suite