438848 - Epilepsy Patients physical harm problem (prevent triggering blinking animations)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, enhancement)

Description

[tester]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14

firefox need to block automatically animation that specifically design to make physical damage to Epilepsy Patients

more on this:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/epilepsy

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Harry]

This is a serious point, but shouldn't it be listed under "enhancement"? The guys at Mozilla are great people but I don't know by what criteria one would block content...

Worth looking into though, as possible gains making the small chance of success worth it.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

See <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/vpat.html>, section K : Firefox already avoids blinking text in the UI, uses a special timer for the blink tag, and provides a way to disable the blink tag all together.

If it's an animated GIF or APNG : according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_tag>, a frequency between 2 Hz and 55 Hz could be dangerous, but that seems to cover many animations. Auto-blocking would practically disable all of them..

If the animation is Flash or Javascript (for instance, <http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html>), then it's practically impossible to detect.

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

There must be a hundred ways to cause blinking with plugins, video, JavaScript, SVG, whatever.

Comment 4

[Aaron Leventhal]

Maybe this could be done system wide via a display driver wrapper like ZoomText. Or on Linux via something a compositor Compiz.

By getting it at the low level you have better guarantees to stop it.

Another thing to remember is:
Complex rules inspire complex attempts to get around those rules.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Not a Firefox-specific bug, moving to Core.

Comment 6

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Based on comments and discussion with Davidb, closing as WONTFIX since this should really be done system-wide rather than inside Gecko apps. Moreover, we don't have any control over plugins and other parts, like Aaron suggested in comment #3.