Accessible means of quickly toggling JavaScript in Firefox?

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Fri Jul 5 13:27:27 UTC 2019


Okay, so I'm sure I'm not the only one on this list who has been
frustrated by the catch 22 that:

1. JavaScript often makes websites harder to navigate with a screen reader.

but

2. Many websites require JavaScript to function properly and the list
of such websites is growing daily.

Prior to Firefox 57 forcing complete rewrites of all Firefox
extensions, I was content with using NoScript to manage JavaScript
permissions and really liked that it provided a context menu option
with rather, in my opinion, intuitive options for allowing/blocking
content in the active tab.

Like many, I didn't care for how NoScript's redesign was done,
especially with the loss of the easy to use context menu entries, and
for a while I was making do with using about:config and toggling
javascript.enable as needed, but as more websites that once worked
fine without JavaScript pointlessly reimplement features using
JavaScript(Google's removal of html headings from the non-JS version
of search results was a major blow) and it becomes harder to divide my
browsing habits into "websites that need JavaScript" and "websites
that work better without JavaScript" that solution has become
untenable.

I've installed NoScript in the hopes that things have improved, but
while it's regained a context menu entry, instead of it being a menu
of relevant allow and block actions, it's just a link that brings up
an options dialog that seems a bit confusing and not all that
accessible, and for some reason, after a couple of days using the new
NoScript Interface and, best I can tell, adding the websites I visit
daily to the trusted list, the dialog is failing to load and I've
already tried reinstalling both Firefox and NoScript.

If anyone knows of a JavaScript permissions extension that can be
operated entirely from the context menu(or better yet, toggles
JavaScript in the active tab with a simple keyboard shortcut), I'd
love to hear about it. Failing that, any alternative to NoScript with
a more accessible interface or even a possible solution to the
NoScript dialog failing to load when I select NoScript from the
context menu would be appreciated.

If it matters, I'm presently running Firefox-ESR 60.7.2 on a 32-bit
Debian-derived system and I installed NoScript from the Debian
repositories because Firefox was refusing to let me install anything
from addons.mozzilla.org(though that was before I decided to downgrade
from Firefox 67).




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