XUL Accessibility

• Funded by: The Mozilla Foundation.
• Work of the project: WebAIM helped create a set of guidelines and a desktop tool to help improve the accessibility of the XUL user interface language.

Project Overview

In 2006, WebAIM worked with the Mozilla Foundation to help improve the accessibility of XUL, the XML User Interface Language. Since XUL forms the UI layer all the popular Mozilla products (including the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client), the language must be accessible in order for those application to achieve complete accessibility and assistive technology support.

WebAIM's project involved the creation of the XUL Accessibility Guidelines, a set of standards and suggestions to help XUL authors write accessible code, and the XUL Accessibility Tool, a desktop tool to help identify and fix potential accessibility problems in existing code. The XUL Accessibility tool was based on LRAE, an accessibility evaluation framework WebAIM developed as part of continuing work on the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool