Compounding this is that Firefox is equally problematic with Audible. For quite some time, as in years, Firefox will not display items in a search or category browsing and the library also has issues with displaying correctly. I used to use Firefox exclusively with Audible and then the display issues popped up. After that, I used IE to shop and add items to my cart and then used Firefox to check out so that I could use the automatic download feature with new purchases. Then, when Audible started allowing preorders, I found that mixing preorders and current items would stop the automatic download feature from working, so I had to separate my preorders and new purchases into their own orders so I could continue to use the feature. Later, I can’t recall when, but it has been quite some time now, automatic download just stopped working for me, so I just went over to IE completely since even the IE quirks were better than not being able to display items at all. I wish that the iss ues would go away, but that little not assuring users of Audible’s commitment to accessibility has been up for several years now and they have yet to do anything beyond their initial alterations to the main page. As soon as one goes past the accessible main page, one is back on the standard site for every single other page. Literally years, and absolutely no further changes, even though they continue to tout their commitment.
I really don’t get why Audible hasn’t continued their improvements since they are one of the few businesses where blind users are a more signifigant percentage of their market than the average company. I don’t know if the project just floundered or if the purchase of the company by Amazon is the cause, but whatever the cause, the continued lack of listening to blind users complaints about the site is really frustrating. Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do except continue to make our opinions known to Audible and to hope that at some point, somebody there will listen. Regards, Chris From: Vaughan DoddVaughan Sent: Friday, March 14, 2014 2:12 PM To: Chris Subject: Re: IE 11 Getting stuck on certain pages and not keeping proper focus on others I can verify similar experiences with Ie11 and Audible: I really do not think that Audible in particular is paying attention to its stated commitment to improve accessibility of its site, and in general - Ie11 just isn't the improvement touted by Microsoft. Can offer any suggestions which might be helpful. Vaughan. On 14/03/2014 12:07 p.m., Chris wrote: I’ve done pretty well with IE 11, but I’ve noticed a problem I didn’t have, or at least didn’t notice with IE 10. First, some pages like Audible for example do not keep proper focus when I do things like use home, end, page up and page down. I can be in the middle of a page and then decide to go back to the top, hit home and hear top of page and then when I start tabbing through links, II find myself exactly where I was before moving to the top of the page. If I use the arrow keys, things go as they should, it is as if I am in two places on the page at the same time depending on how I decide to navigate. Not a earth shaking problem, but still quite annoying, particularly on pages where I have habitual navigation patterns that get interrupted by this issue. The second, and, IMO more severe issue is that I find that I now get stuck in a lot of pages. It seems to happen most on pages with a lot of objects like youtube videos and all of the controls that come with that, tweets posted in the middle of an article and other such objects. When I run into this, I find that, when trying to read the content just around the object I am stuck in a loop, only able to arrow through a certain number of lines of text over and over again. Getting to the rest of the text is difficult or impossible, I have to page down to get away from the loop and often miss text since moving back up simply gets me back into the loop. I am including a link to an article at TMZ that is a good example of this. I can get to the first clip and play it, but whether I have played the clip or not on the current visit to the page, I can only get to a couple of lines beyond the controls for the clip, paging down takes me to the next clip at the end of the story and I can naviga te up via arrow keys and read a couple of lines of the text of the story before getting into the loop again. http://www.tmz.com/2014/03/13/movie-trailer-voice-hal-douglas-dead/ I run into this with a lot of stories I go to on this site, luckily I don’t read a whole lot of their stories, but I also encounter it often on sites like Cnet and a lot of the Gawker sites like Gizmodo, IO9, and Lifehacker. Something about the Gawker sites makes them difficult and tricky to read with Window Eyes anyway, and I haven’t been able to participate in commenting on these sites since a major redesign a couple of years ago and many objects they include in their stories do not even appear to Window Eyes (I generally get stuck in the loop on things like embedded tweets and such since I don’t think a single video clip controls object embedded in one of their articles has been visible to Window Eyes for me in something like three or four years), add in getting stuck in these loops, even just from time to time, and it makes these sites that I truly enjoy reading frustrating enough for me to move from a daily reader to a rare user. On a side note, I am no t sure if these loops are a problem in Firefox. So far, most of the sites that I have these problems with actually have more issues in Firefox, or at least did with the last version. I haven’t checked since the last major update, but after many disappointments I haven’t rushed out to chek it out with each new update. For example, the Gawker sites with Firefox display virtually every control that exists in the page code, including administrative controls that should be invisible to the standard user. The controls don’t do anything, attempts to use even the one’'s a reader can use like comment controls only work sporadically and the mess of extra edit boxes and buttons make the articles difficult to navigate. OK, sorry about all of the extra complaints, I only meant to address the two problems that are new to me with IE 11, but these other issues have been bothering me for a long time so it is hard not to vent about them when discussing the other problems with the pages. Anyway, if anyone knows of any settings changes that might fix any of these issues, I would love to know. I would love to bring the accessibility issues to the attention of the sites with the issues beyond the two main ones I meant to discuss, but TMZ doesn’t seem to really care and I have yet to be able to find a way to contact the Gawker technical people to let them know that there are issues with their sites. Thanks, Chris If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
