Dennis,
Very well said.
Pat ByrneAt 06:33 PM 11/7/2015, you wrote:
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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