[NFBCS] Navigation Sounds for Mozilla Firefox

[Curtis Chong]

Hello Everyone:

 

This email discusses how you can get navigational sounds for the Mozilla
Firefox browser in Windows. If you are not interested in this topic, feel
free to delete this and move on.

 

Navigational sounds was an extension for Mozilla Firefox which played a
sound for the Start and Complete Navigation events. It was easy to install,
and no configuration was required. All a person had to do was to configure
Windows to play the appropriate sounds for these events through the Windows
Control Panel. In 2017, Firefox was updated to the Quantum version, and the
Navigational Sounds extension no longer worked. This was a problem for me
because Firefox took longer than other browsers to make a web page available
to my screen reading program, and I needed to know when a web page was
actually available for review. So, I spent some time trying to find a
replacement for Navigational Sounds.

 

If you Google "Firefox navigational sounds", your first hit points you to
the Noise extension for Firefox. I tried this extension and found that it
did not generate any sounds for the Start and End Navigation events.
Consequently, my advice is to avoid the Noise<smile>.

 

The Firefox add-on which actually worked for me is something called Extra
Sounds. According to the developer:

 

"This add-on will add sounds to your Firefox. Currently it supports 5
events: the start and complete of navigation, new download, the download is
complete and error downloading."

 

This add-on took a bit of work to find. No matter what I tried, I could not
find it with the search engines I traditionally use (i.e., www.google.com or
www.startpage.com).

 

So, to save you some time, if you want to read about Extra Sounds, point
your browser to
https://jawhien.tiflohelp.ru/en/articles/other/extrasounds.php.

 

To install Extra Sounds, go to
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/extra-sounds/.

 

After Extra Sounds has been installed, you may find that its default sounds
are not loud enough. Fortunately, Extra Sounds can be configured to use
whatever sounds you have available to you in Windows. However, JAWS users
should know that as of this writing, Firefox might crash if you use JAWS to
enter the configuration section of the add-on. I had to use NVDA to
accomplish this task.

 

To configure Extra Sounds, follow these steps.

 

1.	Start Firefox.
2.	Press CTRL+SHIFT+A to reach the Firefox Add-ons manager.
3.	Click or press Enter on the Extra Sounds link. This will bring up a
new page which does not always show up properly with your screen reader. It
might be necessary to press F5 to refresh the screen.
4.	If the screen is properly refreshed, you should be able to read
information about Extra sounds such as the home page for the add-on and the
number of reviews that have been written about it.
5.	Now, find the More Options button and activate it. A context menu
should appear. Select the item which says Options. This should take you to
the Extra Sounds Preferences page.
6.	At this point, you want to click or press Space on the Custom sounds
tab.
7.	After you have assigned all of the sounds to the events you want, be
sure to press the Save Preferences button.

 

I trust the geeks among us will find this information helpful.

 

Cordially,

 

Curtis Chong