Yura Zenevich home

Resources For Contributing to Firefox OS Accessibility.

28 Nov 2014 - Toronto, ON

I believe when contributing to Firefox OS and Gaia, just like with most open source projects, a lot of attention should be given to reducing the barrier for entry for new contributors. It is even more vital for Gaia since it is an extremely fast moving project and the number of things to keep track of is overwhelming. In an attempt to make it easier to start contributing to Firefox OS Accessibility I compiled the following list of resources, that I will try keeping up to date. It should be helpful for a successful entry into the project:

Firstly, links to high level documentation:


Git

Gaia project is hosted on Github and the version control that is used is Git. Here's a link to the project source code:

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/

One of my coworkers (James Burke) proposed the following workflow that you might find useful (link to source):

    git clone --recursive git@github.com:yzen/gaia.git gaia-yzen
    cd gaia-yzen
    git remote add upstream git@github.com:mozilla-b2g/gaia.git
    # this updates your local master to match mozilla-b2g's latest master
    # you should always do this to give better odds your change will work
    # with the latest master state for when the pull request is merged
    git pull upstream master

    # this updates your fork on github's master to match
    git push origin master

    # Create bug-specific branch based on current state of master
    git checkout -b bug-123
    git commit -am "Bug 123 - this is the summary of changes."
    git push origin bug-123
    git rebase -i upstream/master

At this point, git gives you a way to edit all the commits. I normally 'pick' the first one, then choose 's' for squash for the rest, so the rest of the commits are squashed to the first picked commit.

Once that is done and git is happy, you can the force push the new state of the branch back to GitHub:

    git push -f origin bug-123

More resources at:


Source Code

More resources at:


Building and Running Gaia


Testing


Localization

Localization is very relevant to accessibility especially because one of the tasks that we perform when making something accessible is ensuring that all elements in the applications are labeled for the user of assistive technologies. Please see Localization best practices for guidelines on how to add new text to applications.


Debugging


Using a screen reader

Using a device or navigating a web application is different with the screen reader. Screen reader introduces a concept of virtual cursor (or focus) that represents screen reader's current position inside the app or web page. For mode information and example videos please see: Screen Reader


Accessibility

Here are some of the basic resources to help you get to know what mobile accessibility (and accessibility) is:

yzen