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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