935583 - Investigate how automatic updates might adversely impact accessibility users in older distros

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Joanmarie Diggs]

At the moment, linux distro users get automatic Firefox updates through two possible channels:

* The distro package manager
* Firefox itself

In the former case, it is assumed that the distro's package maintainer will ensure the appropriate checks have been made so that the new Firefox version will function as expected in that environment.

In chatting with Alex Surkov, we are not sure what checks are made when Firefox updates itself. The reason this *might* become an issue w.r.t. access for users with disabilities is that their screen reader, accessibility libraries, etc. might not work as expected with the updated Firefox, especially in older distros. And upgrading just the accessibility tools in that older distro might not be possible without updating to a newer version of the distro.

This may be a non-issue. Or it may be something that cannot be addressed within Firefox's automatic updates. But Alex asked me to file this, so I am. :)

Comment 1

[Trevor Saunders (:tbsaunde)]

So, really this has nothing to do with updates, but the fact you can run mozilla.org firefox binaries on machines with old system libraries.  Since we don't care about those binaries running on things with even older libs than the build machines (centos 6) 
and we link libxul against libatk-1.0 we are sure at build time that we only use symbols in atk that will be there atleast until atk breaks abi.  However if atk changes api or we want to use newer things in atk then we need to do run time checks to make sure those are ok.