Accessibility of Thunderbird address book entries

[DGrothe-PhD]

Hi there,

as a daughter of an old person with recently developed bad visuals, I would like to make Thunderbird read out the information of its address-book entries. While he was using his eyes, he typed a lot of email addresses and phone numbers therein, also opening hours and special fields of construction workers.
A lot of useful information which he only can access while I am able to sit there helping him. Currently, accessibility seems cumbersome as I have not found an easier way than the following, assuming Microsoft Windows text-to-speech functionality is activated:

1) open an entry for editing
2) press Tab key a lot of times
to get a phone number or opening hours written in the notes.

Thunderbird's source code does not seem to be available online so I cannot guess which programming language is written in, let alone contribute that feature by writing an add-on.

• I hereby suggest to document an existing accessibility feature or add-on I should have missed out on.
• Otherwise I hereby suggest to make Thunderbird have some "read full address book entry page" button, which then can be accessed by a keystroke or at least through short sequence of Tab keys.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[wsmwk]

Thank you for raising accessibility issues. 

I checked with a developer, who offers, "Right now the only support we have established is with screen readers directly and not any other sort of Assistive Technology (AT) or AT adjacent technology."  In other words, the Thunderbird address book was developed with accessibility in mind.  However, text to speech is not part of the design criteria, so it may not be sufficient for the needs you describe.  Therefore, you may need to enable or install accessibility software in your operating system, such as orca and nvda.  

I hope this helps.  You might find additional help at https://groups.io/g/thunderbird and https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/thunderbird

Source code is available at https://developer.thunderbird.net/