New book on using multiple screen readers to browse the web

[kestrell]

Kes: David Kingsbury is a technology instructor at the Carroll Center for the Blind and has an amazing knowledge of screen readers: I took three days of classes with him about a month ago and learned a phenomenal amount.

_When One Web Browser Is Not Enough: A Guide for Windows Screen Reader Users_ by David Kingsbury

In just the last few years, more web browsers have become accessible, and screen reader users can greatly benefit by becoming familiar with multiple browsers. Websites are complex animals. When things go wrong with one browser, your first line of defense is often to switch browsers. Each browser has strengths and weaknesses, so you can pick and choose features among them to get the best browsing experience. And once you are comfortable with one browser, it’s not hard to pick up the basics of the others.

When One Web Browser Is Not Enough: A Guide for Windows Screen Reader Users by David Kingsbury, Assistive Technology Instructor at the Carroll Center for the Blind, is meant to help JAWS, NVDA, and Windows Narrator users to effectively use the four leading web browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge – in ways that build on the strengths of each of them. Topics covered include: recent trends in web browser and screen reader usage; web accessibility criteria; screen reader keystrokes and strategies for efficiently accessing and navigating websites; browser menu structure; useful web browser features and commands; and JAWS, NVDA and Narrator customizations. Two appendices – a list of keystrokes and a glossary of Internet terms – are included for convenient reference.

The book can be purchased for $20 at:
https://carroll.org/product/when-one-web-browser-is-not-enough/

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

What a lovely resource! It's weird though, although sigh Microsoft, that one still has to learn how to use Internet Explorer. Microsoft itself has sunsetted the damn program, having iterated Edge twice.

Did Kingsbury have any wisdom on Chrome-alikes generally? In addition to Edge, There's Brave, Vivaldi, or Opera?

[kestrell]

The best feature for continuing to use IE, which David taught me, is to use it to construct a Favorites file, which you can then place on your desktop. Using IE makes it really easy to add to, edit, and maintain this folder. Then, when you click on your Favorites folder, it opens up in your chosen default browser.

Editing bookmarks in Chrome using a screen reader is just impossible, or, at least, way more time consuming and tedious.

David mentioned Brave, and the privacy issue that Brave is designed to address, but he didn't really get into browsers outside of IE, Firefox, and Chrome. This was fine by me, because we spent three straight days stuffing my brain with the learning plan I had outlined, and that focused on Chrome and Google apps.

Regarding IE, you need to remember that *lots* of visually impaired users are using old versions of Jaws, because either they can't afford the updates, or the cognitive load and anxiety of learning a new browser and new versions of Jaws--which is *radically* different from what it was even four years ago--is a hard limit. I spent three full days from 9 to 5 just updating my Jaww, Word, Outlook, and Google Drive and Docs skills. It was both hard and exhausting, and I still need to often go back and review the docs and lists of keyboard shortcuts.

When you are visually impaired, learning a new, or even updated interface, is like having someone come in and reorganize your kitchen, or your library, according to their idea of where things should go, and then leaving you to figure out where the things you need are. And when you can't even find your coffee, everything else gets a lot harder.

The desktop Favorites trick

[jesse_the_k]

is awesome.

Of the browsers I’ve used, I’ve found Safari’s bookmark manager to be the most reliable (although that’s not saying much). I treat its Favorites as Truth, and export/import to other browsers when I update. Manual but it works.

I can assign domains to different browsers with a nifty extension called StopTheMadness, which I just kvelled about on my blog.

Great point about the tech lag imposed on blind users!

I appreciate your "who rearranged my kitchen!" analogy, which also obtains for me thanks to my short-term memory issues. Learning new interfaces is wicked hard these days. I have around 90 "good minutes" a day when I can actually learn stuff, and sometimes it takes a week to repeat the lessons until they stick.

Forgot the best part of STM's features

[jesse_the_k]

It allows you to decide who wins for key press in text areas, which I hope would minimize wrestling with google docs

Here's the relevant features which you can control on a URL basis:

Textarea: When enabled, multi-line text editors (HTML textarea elements) are also protected by the website options "⌘-key shortcuts", "Cut, copy, and paste", and "Text selection". By default, only single-line editors (HTML input elements) are protected, because multi-line editors don't usually prevent copy and paste, and a lot of websites have special multi-line "rich text" editors with highly customized editing that can break with the textarea feature enabled. However, you may need to enable this feature on certain websites if they disable copy and paste.

All key presses: When enabled, stops websites from hijacking key presses on the page. This feature cannot be enabled with the Default options for all websites, because it would cause breakages on too many sites. It usually shouldn't be necessary, but in some rare cases a website will go to extreme lengths to interfere with your typing. (Note: textareas are not covered by "All key presses" unless the "Textarea" option is also enabled.)