Greetings, Everyone,
First, a personal heart-felt welcome to new members who signed up as a
result of the tech seminar earlier this month. We're glad you're here.
I promised a twice-weekly at minimum message that focused on either a mini
tutorial of some kind or quick news and information bits about the world
of
assistive tech.
It's been one week since Internet Explorer 8 was officially released, and
while most of us probably won't bother to update, those of us who have may
be finding some advantages and disadvantages by now.
First, if you just can't concentrate on the rest of this message until you
know where and how to get Internet Explorer 8, here's the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/worldwide-sites.aspx
Ok, now that takes care of you gotta-have-it-instantly folks. If the rest
of you are still reading, let's explore what's in Internet Explorer 8 and
whether you should bother.
First, from a security standpoint, you probably should bother. Microsoft
seems to have tightened some holes that existed in previous versions.
Anecdotal experience tells me that it's slightly faster than was Internet
Explorer 7, but I've not sat down with a stopwatch and calculated the
milliseconds required to navigate from site to site, so you shouldn't take
that as an official pronouncement. So other than security and speed, why
should you care?
Well, there's not much that's worth getting all excited about. The new IE
8
offers a feature called Accelerators. These accelerators, when installed,
allow you to do things very quickly like send selected text from a web
page
to a blog or an e-mail address. If you create lots of tiny URLs from
large
ones, these accelerators let you do that in a flash--they're rather
impressive.
The other new feature of IE 8 is one called Web Slices. I'm not
suggesting
these aren't useful to a screen reader user, but I'm not so sure they're
all
that necessary or helpful. Prove me wrong, someone, please! These web
slices allow you to see pieces of a frequently updated web site in a
toolbar
like thing no matter what other site you may be visiting.
So if you're a frequent watcher of the MSNBC or Fox News Channel web
sites,
you can set them up so that updated content appears in the bar regardless
of
what other site you may be visiting at the time. I suppose this is great
for people keeping track of e-Bay bids and such, but I doubt personally
I'll
do much with it. Of course, I said that about the tabs that were
introduced
in IE 7, and now I live and die by those tabs. I absolutely love them and
would never give them up.
The new smart screen filtering lets you know when you're on a site that
wants to install spyware or mess with your identity by snagging your
credit
card info from the bowels of your hard drive. I've not yet visited a page
that caused the smart screen filtering feature to warn me about it, so I
can't speak to its effectiveness.
So what gets broken with this install in terms of your assistive tech?
Window-Eyes users, you may notice that you have to flip browse mode off
and
on more than you used to. For some reason, my installation of Window-Eyes
doesn't properly refresh pages in IE 8 the way it did in IE 7. This could
be unique to my install only, however.
JAWS 10 users, you should do really quite well. I didn't notice anything
about IE 8 that appears broken in JAWS 10. Pages refresh automatically as
needed and forms mode seems to work as advertised with IE 8.
Please remember these experiences are mine alone; you may have very
differing experiences depending on the assistive tech you use and even the
configuration of your PC.
Finally, I will try to not send many of these observation pieces to the
list. I know you'd much rather focus on how to do things and/or on
getting
specific answers to specific questions; this message doesn't meet either
of
those needs. But I thought I'd at least share my experiences with IE 8
under the assumption that some of you have already downloaded it or are
toying with the idea.
Regards,
Nolan
