Hello Gerald and others,
At Harvard and I think Stanford, Google Chrome is used in the programming
classes for web development, so they apparently do not share Eric Damery's
opinion as presented in the email post. I would be curious to know how
recently Eric made that statement. Chrome, at least for sighted programmers
is a very important program because it can process the HTML source code from
a webpage and present it in a very "human readable" form, as opposed to
simply displaying the source code directly in its raw form. As David Malan
who teaches CS50 and other web programming courses at Harvard explains in
the first class, IE and Firefox do not provide this capability. He doesn't
care what browsers students choose to use, he simply explains that it will
be much more difficult if one does not use Chrome to do internet
programming, because of its built-in tools.
Perhaps Eric meant that Chrome is not ready for prime time for blind people
using screen readers. If so, this is obviously very bad news for blind
programmers taking CS courses at Harvard and Stanford, since their
performance will be measured against sighted students in their classes who
are using Chrome, and the blind student's productivity will be seriously
diminished and their ability to complete their assignments on time made
almost impossible without Chrome.
Likewise, if employers are using Chrome for the same reason as David Malan,
and blind programmers can't use it, they are not going to be hired. This
isn't discrimination. The employer would be correct in concluding that the
blind programmer cannot do the job as quickly and efficiently as a sighted
programmer, so to hire the blind programmer would mean the employer is
paying the same money for less software output.
I had not looked at Chrome for almost 2 years since I tried to use it in a
programming course, and at that time I found it virtually inaccessible using
Jaws. When I downloaded it again 2 days ago after reading an earlier email
stating that it is now "totally accessible," I was very pleased and
surprised at the current level of Chrome's accessibility. Prior to this, I
believed their was something about the way Chrome was programmed that made
it inherently incompatible with screen readers, but this is clearly not the
case.
If Eric actually believes "Chrome isn't ready for prime time", then this
would explain and justify an anemic effort by Freedom Scientific to support
Chrome, since no company would spend development capital to support a
product which it believes is never going to take hold, or won't mature for a
substantial time.
But corporate decision making and assignment of priorities most times falls
somewhere between mysterious and inexplicable, and is too often motivated
by attempts to gain market advantage, or based on hidden corporate
alliances. Who can know? It has become a common practice for salesmen to
disparage products they don't sell or can't support, as well as disparaging
their own older products when they are now trying to sell their new ones.
I hope Jaws users will download Chrome, try to systematically find its
deficiencies with Jaws, and send this information to Freedom Scientific so
that Chrome can be made as close to 100 percent accessible as is possible
using a screen reader. for us as blind people, software like Chrome is a
matter of employment instead of unemployment. When I obtained my MS in
computer science in 1984, virtually all computer jobs were available to me,
because all programming environments were 100 percent accessible to me using
my Braille computer terminal and an Optacon to fill in the gaps.
Today, so much software is inaccessible at a level necessary for employment,
that it has become increasingly difficult for us to find and keep jobs of
any sort, because most jobs involve using a computer. And as many on this
list know through personal experience, that which is accessible today, can
easily become inaccessible tomorrow simply because a vendor chooses to
release a software upgrade, with unemployment being the result. When the
blind employee can no longer perform his job, what is the employer's
alternative? The employer is powerless to fix the problem, since they don't
write the application software or the screen reader programs. Even if the
employer doesn't wish to upgrade because of the effect it will have on the
blind employee, a small employer will ultimately have no choice because the
software vendor will stop support for the old product to force the business
to buy the new product.
I think it is critical that we as customers let Freedom Scientific know what
products we need to be made accessible, otherwise they can only guess. This
isn't their fault. By definition, they work for a small software company, so
the jobs they see and experience are in that environment, and their
priorities are established from that vantage point. If your a blind lawyer
and you cannot get or keep a job at a mega law firm because the new law firm
billing software is not accessible, this is something FS won't experience
and won't know about. Likewise, if you're a financial advisor and you cannot
get or keep a job at a Wall Street firm or mega bank, FS will not know what
job critical software must be made accessible unless they are told. These
are examples of the places where jobs are located, and we cannot get and
keep those jobs if we are unable to use the software on which the jobs are
based. Last time I checked into this, most of the corporate networks for
these large firms are still running Windows XP, very old versions of MS
Office, and the inaccessible applications they are running are not Microsoft
products. I would be curious to know how much money and effort FS has spent
on IE 11 accessibility as opposed to Google Chrome.
Just my 2 cents worth, but accounting for inflation may be worth 4 cents,
though probably not quite that much.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald Levy via Jfw" <[email protected]>
To: "The Jaws for Windows support list." <[email protected]>
Cc: "Gerald Levy" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2015 8:35 AM
Subject: Re: Chrome and bookmarks/favorites
Which explains why Eric Damery still advises JAWS users to avoid Chrome.
As far as he is concerned, Chrome is still not ready yet for prime time.
Gerald
-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Spratt via Jfw
Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2015 10:51 AM
To: The Jaws for Windows support list.
Cc: Adrian Spratt
Subject: Chrome and bookmarks/favorites
Hi.
I can't get favorites, which Chrome calls bookmarks, to work as quickly as
they do in IE. Here's what I've figured out so far. I hope the gaps can be
filled in.
You get to bookmarks by pressing alt for the menu, then arrowing down.
Press enter on bookmarks. Here, I'm told that the shortcut control-shift-b
brings up bookmarks, but that shortcut isn't working on my system when I'm
outside this menu. Each time I have to go through the menu.
In IE, I press alt-a to bring up my favorites list, and first-letter
navigation works. I can't find anything this simple using Chrome.
One item in the bookmarks submenu allows you to import favorites settings.
I clicked on this, tabbed through the options, and was told at the end
that I was successful. However, nothing seems to have been imported.
Any ideas?
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