This is to report a simple comparison I just did of the time it takes to load a web page with Internet Explorer 5 beta 2 and Slimware Window Bridge 2.54, JAWS for Windows, 3.2031, or Window-Eyes 3.0. My office computer (at a federal agency in Washington) is a Pentium 200 with 32 megs of memory and a direct connection to the Internet. I picked the home page of Richard Seltzer (http://www.samizdat.com), the author of Internet-on-a-Disk newsletter and various other publications. It is admittedly a large page, but thus also one that facilitates comparisons not skewed by small differences in network traffic and other variables. I first ran JFW and reformatted the page for optimum speech, resulting in a loading time of under a minute. I then ran Window-Eyes, resulting in a loading time of about 8 minutes. Finally, I ran Window Bridge, resulting in a loading time of under a minute. In short, the JFW and Bridge times were comparable and reasonable. The Window-Eyes time, unfortunately, was about 8 times slower and unreasonably long to wait, in my opinion. JFW does not use MSAA; Bridge and Window-Eyes do. The screen readers differ in the convenience of navigation and form entry once a page is loaded. This comparison did not address those other issues. Regards, Jamal - Visit the jfw ml web page: http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/~nallan/jfw
