Recently, Mozilla released version 38.0.5 of Firefox, which is their Web
browser. I have been using Firefox for my Web browsing since version 3. If that
impresses you, try not to be, as Firefox now comes out with new versions every
six weeks or so.
Anyway, this browser has always been very accessible with screen readers and
there are several reasons for why it has become my browser of choice, both at
work and at home. However, version 38.0.5 introduced a new feature that I’ve
been wanting for a long time and which we’ve had built-in to Apple products for
some time, that being what is called a reader view.
Here’s what this means and why you’d want to use it, even if you’re a sighted
user. You can probably relate to the experience of visiting Web pages such as
blogs or news sites and you find an article or story that you want to read. You
press enter or spacebar on the link and the page loads with the selected
article. However, above the article wyou encounter a plethora of links, frames
and other unwanted or sometimes unnecessary text. Screen readers do have
shortcut keys to navigate past this clutter but they don’t always work the way
you might like and, let’s face it, not everyone keeps lists of shortcut keys
stored in their heads. Some are obvious if you remember to use them: H to move
to the next heading or pressing the number 1 moves you to the first level 1
heading, which often takes you past the clutter and to the beginning of the
article. This often works but not all of the time. You can press the letter N
to move your cursor past the list of links to the first line of text but this
doesn’t always take you to where you want to go.
Now, with Firefox, you can activate this reader view which will try and remove
the extraneous links and just display the text of the page which is opened. To
make this work, you must go to the View menu with alt-V, then arrow down to the
“reader view” option and press the enter key. To move back to the previous page
you were reading, pressing either the backspace
key or the alt-left arrow key combination will do it.
You should note that this method will not be available for all pages but it
should work for most pages which contain large blocks of text, such as a news
article or a blog post. The only thing I’d like to see which would make
activating this feature a bit more convenient would be a hotkey to instantly
activate this view, which exists for the Mac. I’m going to file a ticket on the
Mozilla bug tracker, which allows users to report bugs and suggestions, and
suggest this to Mozilla. Happy reading.
David Goldfield
Feel free to visit my Web site
www.davidgoldfield.info <http://www.davidgoldfield.info/>
