To learn about Awesome Highlighter, and using it as a study aid, please read what I wrote about that yesterday. For anyone who finds Awesome Highlighter useful, the Firefox add-on makes it more convenient. When the add-on is installed, a button appears next to the Google search bar. (In my case that’s alongside buttons for my Piclens and Skype add-ons.

When you click on the AH button, it brings up the Awesome Highlighter toolbar and gives you all the options of the application. This saves you the trouble of going to the website each time you want to use it. This is invaluable for anyone using Awesome Highlighter on a regular basis. I have been very pleasantly surprised to discover that the Awesome Highlighter add-on works fine in the recently released Firefox 3.

But there is still a problem with some Firefox add-ons. They don’t yet work in Firefox 3. As of today, June 26th, this is still the case with CliCk,Speak, the text-to-speech add-on that allows any page open in Firefox to be read aloud. (I’m pleased to say that Accessibar is now compatible with Firefox 3. Since it is a little difficult to find it, I’ve used Awesome Highlighter to highlight the download link HERE.)

If you, or someone you know has already downloaded Firefox 3 and discovered that essential add-ons won’t work, there is a solution to tide you over until the add-ons you need are updated. You can uninstall Firefox 3, and re-install a previous version. You can’t download previous versions directly from Mozilla, but you can get one HERE at OldApps.com I suggest that you use Version 2.0.0.14. You shouldn’t need to worry about losing bookmarks or other personal information because this is normally stored separate from the program on your computer.

Accessibar is a toolbar that can be installed as an add-on for the Firefox browser with a set of tools to make the internet more accessible for people with special needs. Accessibar is especially useful for those with low vision. As with all toolbar icons in Firefox, the toolbar shown below can include text that names the function of the icon. All of the Accessibar functions can also be activated with keyboard shortcuts that can be configured by the user.

In the words of the toolbar’s developers, here’s what the Accessibar tools will do for you.

• Web page fonts and background colors can be changed from a selecton of 70 colors on current session
• Icons with configurable shortcut keys to increase and decrease Font size.
• Line spacing can be increased or decreased to five different spacing settings incrementally.
• All images (including Flash) displayed on a web page can be selected as being hiden or shown.
• All changes made to web page display can be restored to original page settings by pressing “Restore Page“.
• Changes made to the currently displayed web page persist until “Restore Page“ is selected.
• Integrated Text To Speech reader. Reads out strings hovered over as well as focused elements.
• Reader settings can be configured allowing the selection of the voice, volume, speaking rate, pitch, and voice range.
• Toolbar functions have configurable Hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts).

I tested Accessibar’s text-to-speech function, and I found it to work reasonably well. It does an especially good job of reading links and buttons. As a sighted reader, however,I much prefer to use CLiCk,Speak for reading passages of text. I wonder if it might be the same for individuals with low vision if they are able to use Accessibar’s tools to enable them to see the web page effectively. I added the CLiCk,Speak buttons to the Accessibar toolbar. The only drawback is that there are no keyboard commands for the CLiCk,Speak buttons.