I have been evaluating IBM's Home Page Reader (HPR), and comparing it
to JFW with IE4.
Let me summarize before giving specifics. HPR makes the net easier,
not more accessible. If you can't access a page with JFW, you will
probably not be able to access it with HPR. But, the pages you can
access are definitely easier to use.
Positive points
HPR reads a whole web page with one key stroke. There are no pauses at
the end of lines. You can move up and down the page by paragraph
rather than by line, which makes reading more logical. And if you do
jump around, you don't have to reinitiate the say all command. You can
just keep reading from the new position. If you stop in the middle of
a line, you can start on the same word where you stopped, you don't
have to hear from the beginning of the line. Links are read in a
different voice so they're easy to identify. If you don't understand a
link by its name, you can quickly read the whole sentence that
contains that link without having to route the jaws cursor there. When
you hit the back button to return to the previous page, you're put at
the spot where you were last, not at the top of the page. Pages are
automatically formatted so they read in the most natural way. It seems
to work even better than the reformat command in JFW. You receive more
information about the layout of the page than with JFW which helps you
better organize complex pages in your mind. HPR works better with
select menus or combo boxes. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but
sometimes with JFW when I'm arrowing through a combo box, I'm taken to
another page when I was just trying to look through the choices. And
of course you have the good JFW features in HPR such as putting links
in a list box and quickly moving between frames.
Negative points
In general, HPR works better than JFW with some exceptions. Filling
out forms requires more key strokes with HPR. However, HPR identifies
some form fields that JFW misses. HPR uses to many of its own key
strokes. They're usually logical but it would be easier to learn if it
used more standard Windows commands, menus etc. Finally, neither HPR
nor JFW support Java.
Thanks to all the folks who gave me tough web pages. If you want
to try HPR, go to:
www.ibm.com/sns
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Visit the jfw ml web page: http://jfw.cjb.net
