Does anyone know if #LibreWolf or any other privacy focused #firefox forks keep #screenreader and other #accessibility features? Sadly, most of these projects seem to consider accessibility an unneeded feature that ads bloat and security issues and just strip it out completely, so I don't have high hopes. This just seems to be the latest one getting popular after the recent #firefox issues. #a11y
Librewolf does not strip any accessibility code but some defaults are bad for accessibility. I don't have much a11y experience but I think disabeling ResistFingerprint in the settings will give you 99% of the accessibility that firefox has. If there are still issues then they could be reported to the librewolf bug tracker.
Also if anyone finds accessibility issues in the librewolf specfiic settings tab feel free to report them!
@fastfinge They might keep them. But I doubt that a random fork of Firefox can afford to invest money in being intentional about that, or employing accessibility expertise with the same calibre as the big players.
What happens when that ARIA attribute isn't supported yet, or there's a bug in complex recursive accessibility trees, or there's a new HTML element? Waiting months or years for the fork to catch up (if it ever does at all) doesn't sound appealing.
In short, I think browser accessibility goes way beyond whether the buttons in the bookmarks manager have labels, or if there's an increasingly stale accessibility engine available.
@jscholes LibreWolf updates the fork within a week of a new firefox release. The main difference is removal of advertising features and better defaults. So I'm not too worried about bugfixes. I'm more worried about what they are and aren't removing.
@mcourcel changed the privacy policy so they can sell your data now and have more claim to ownership of data you enter into the browser, introduced an acceptable use policy that could be read to say that looking at adult material using firefox is no longer allowed, and hired the guy formerly responsible for marketing and growth at Facebook.
@fastfinge It might be easier to turn off telemetry/ads stuff in Firefox. You still send a signal that you aren't happy with the current decision if that's your intention by switching. Plus, you keep the advantages of using upstream which has better accessibility support.
@dannycolin How long will they respect that setting, though? How many times will a quote unquote bug turn it all back on after an update, without me noticing?
@fastfinge Waterfox between 2019-2023 got acquired by an advertizing company. You never know when a project is going to do something shady especially if it gets popular fast. Lots of sharks will be interested.
Anyway, I don't want to defend any side. To answer your question, you can use a user.js file where you keep preferences you want to change. This way they can't be modified by the application. It works with forks too. See kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file. Hope it helps :).
