Hello David,
It is because of your email that I took another look at Chrome, and I am
grateful to you that you took the time to post your observations. It appears
that I am not the only one who feels this way.
All the best,
Dennis
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Moore via Jfw" <[email protected]>
To: "The Jaws for Windows support list." <[email protected]>
Cc: "David Moore" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2015 10:07 PM
Subject: Re: Assertion that "Chrome is not ready for prime time!"
Hi Dennis,
I am the original person who said that Google Chrome is totally
accessible. My name is David Moore. Well, I didn't litterly mean totally
accessible, and I was very excited after working with Chrome after two
days. I got carried away. When I saw just how much more accessible Chrome
has become in the last two years, I wondered why the blind think that it
is still totally inaccessible. A lot of Chrome is accessible, much more
than the blind realize. Dennis, It is because of what you said that I have
mentioned Chrome on so many lists, and I am encouraging the blind to try
it to see for themselves just how far its accessibility has come. It still
needs work, I know. But I am asking the same question. Why is Freedom
Scientific not putting as much work into making Chrome accessible since it
is by far the most used browser in colleges and employment. It makes me
wonder and I want the blind to think about this question. I will keep
quiet and just leave it right there. By the way, Chrome is just as
accessible with NVDA as it is with JAWS. Also, the more tools you have the
better off people are. Google Chrome may not be to the point yet to make
it your default browser, but it is a good third browser to use. It is good
to have two or three screen readers as well. When it comes to streaming TV
channels and so on, Chrome beats IE and Firefox hands down. It never
crashes once on me. I use Chrome more than IE, because IE crashes almost
every time I stream video with it. It will not even open a large web site.
Chrome opens large sites twice as fast as IE. Many web sites are
accessible with Chrome. I am glad people are realizing it. If I caused a
few people to try Chrome, I have done my job which is to help all and
bring what is hidden into the light. I am contacting Freedom Scientific on
Monday and asking a lot of questions about making Chrome totally
accessible and why it hasn't been done already. I urge all of you to do
the same. Enjoy Chrome for what it can do, not for what it can not do.
Take care all, and thank you Dennis for saying what you did.
-----Original Message-----
From: Pat Byrne via Jfw
Sent: Saturday, November 7, 2015 7:53 PM
To: The Jaws for Windows support list.
Cc: Pat Byrne
Subject: Re: Assertion that "Chrome is not ready for prime time!"
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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