I need to pick the brains of those who are familiar with the current versions of both WE and JAWS.
About a year ago my company began pushing out a required upgrade to all workstations, and this upgrade included both an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 as well as a browser upgrade from IE7 to IE9. As much of what I do for my job occurs on internal web applications which contain controls not accessible via the keyboard but only via the mouse cursor I have thus far requested and been granted an exception from this upgrade with the expectation that at some point a version of WE would be released containing a fix so that the mouse cursor can read the screen in versions of IE9 and above. However, as I now have the unique distinction of being the only one at my company of nearly 300,000 employees who has not been upgraded and Microsoft has terminated their support for Windows XP, I am being told that my request to continue to be exempted from this upgrade no longer constitutes a "reasonable" accommodation. The argument is being made that continuing my workstation on XP poses a security risk to my company's network and that an alternative to WE which has working mouse cursor functionality in these later versions of IE exists (that being JAWS). I've tried going down the road of seeing if I can have the operating system upgraded yet retaining the earlier version of the browser, but I've been told it's an all or nothing thing. Since the same people within my IT department have told me over the last year on multiple occasions that WE has been upgraded so that the mouse cursor does work in these later versions of IE my confidence in the validity of any statements they make regarding the functionality within screen readers is nonexistent. So I wanted to ask anyone here who may be familiar with both if they know if such functionality truly does exist within JAWS or not? I intend to obtain a demo version of JAWS to try and determine this for myself, but any assistance that can be provided from someone already familiar would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Josh 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.
