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I co-authored a Mozilla blog post about our #a11y work in celebration of International Day of Persons with Disabilities. I'm posting it a bit late here, but better late than never, I guess. :)
How we’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/firefox-accessibility-text-recognition-screen-readers/

How we’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone

This International Day of Persons with Disabilities, I want to share how Mozilla is working to make Firefox accessible for everyone.
Kristina Bravo (The Mozilla Blog)
#a11y

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Jamie Teh

Peter Vágner
Peter Vágner
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Is the image recognition feature exclusive to the MAC or is it behind a feature flag for other platforms as well?
in reply to Peter Vágner

Jamie Teh
Jamie Teh
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@pvagner Currently Mac only. Windows will come next. The reason is that it depends on the OCR facilities provided by the operating system.
@Peter Vágner
in reply to Jamie Teh

Peter Vágner
Peter Vágner
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For the future would it be doable to wire tesseract into this so we can get a bit of joy on linux as well? Or is it too complicated?
Still I believe it's a nice design choice it does not use its own cloud implementation.
in reply to Peter Vágner

Jamie Teh
Jamie Teh
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@pvagner I believe there has been some discussion there. Even though my team has been helping to ensure the UI is accessible, I'm not on the actual team responsible for this feature. I'll see what I can learn though. CC @asadotzler
@Peter Vágner
Unknown parent

Jamie Teh
Jamie Teh
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@asadotzler @pvagner Oh, there are absolutely performance and accuracy concerns with Tesseract. OS OCR is far better on Windows and Mac. However, Tesseract might be the only option if we're ever going to support this on Linux.
@Peter Vágner
Unknown parent

Jamie Teh
Jamie Teh
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@asadotzler @pvagner That's certainly a concern, though I think it's less of a problem with OCR. I think OCR has been around long enough that there's some intuitive understanding that it isn't perfect, plus when it fails, it (usually) fails in such a way as to be very clearly incorrect, rather than plausible enough to be misleading. That said, there's also the question of the technical feasibility of bundling Tesseract for a single OS, etc.
@Peter Vágner
Unknown parent

Jamie Teh
Jamie Teh
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@asadotzler @pvagner Ah, intriguing. I'm not sure.
@Peter Vágner
in reply to Jamie Teh

Peter Vágner
Peter Vágner
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@Jamie Teh @Asa Dotzler Since tesseract v4 accuracy is greatly improved. For adding text layer to scanned pdf files I am using an app called #ocrmypdf which uses #tesseract and it works sufficiently well for me. There are even some unofficial builds of tesseract for #android. Other than self packaged tesseract there is mlkit by google people are using on android for recognizing images. Performance and interfacing with tesseract may not be that great, I understand.
#android #ocrmypdf #tesseract @Jamie Teh
in reply to Jamie Teh

pax
pax
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so why mozilla took so long to fix no heading issue in macOS 13?
in reply to pax

Jamie Teh
Jamie Teh
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@pax We have a small team and a lot of high priority work to juggle. When that bug was first filed, MacOS 13 was in beta. None of our team were able to run it; running a beta OS (or even a newly released OS) is not without its risks. That bug is also very obscure; it seems to be due to a somewhat inexplicable change in VoiceOver, and as usual, Apple's documentation is poor to nonexistent.
@pax
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