[blind-philly-comp] Re: Three Reasons to Surf with Chrome
- From: David Goldfield <david.goldfield@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: blind-philly-comp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2019 07:33:30 -0400
Hi, Jan. You wrote ...
>First, at one point, I was told that FireFox was more accessible than
Chrome, so that's been my default browser on my own computer for years
(though I do use Chrome at one of my volunteer sites). Is that still
true?
It was truemany years ago but Chrome is now accessible with JAWS, NVDA
and even with Narrator, provided that you're running the latest public
release of Windows 10. I also used Firefox for many years and have
recently switched to Google Chrome and have never looked back. For
several reasons I have experienced issues with Firefox that have left me
very disappointed and frustrated. If Firefox is working for you then by
all means you should continue to use it. However, for my needs I no
longer find it an efficient browser. One benefit of using Chrome over
Firefox is that it's generally faster in loading pages. You may or may
not notice the difference in speed but I do, particularly with JAWS.
>Second, are the advantages of using Chrome spelled out in this email
also really true of FireFox?
Pretty much. I can't speak for sorting bookmarks as I rarely use bookmarks
these days and, in fact, you generally don't need to in order to find a site
you've previously visited. However, the features they highlight with Chrome
apply to Firefox. I think they might have done better to highlight some of the
differences, which I admit are hard to point out since both browsers offer
similar features using similar keystrokes. Here are what I think are some
differences.
1. Chrome's performance is, overall, faster than Firefox.
2. Chrome uses an engine in the background to power the browser known as
Chromium. This may seem unimportant to many users but it's important
only because other browsers beside Chrome use the Chromium engine, as
well. What this means is, in theory, that other browsers which use
Chromium in the background should be or at least may be just as fast as
Chrome. It also means that other browsers which use Chromium may be
equally accessible, although I have not delved into other browsers
lately. There are some people who have issues with Chrome because of
Google's perceived invasion of privacy. For those users they can switch
to another Chromium browser that respects privacy perhaps more than
Chrome but should be, in theory, just as accessible.
3. The upcoming release of Microsoft's Edge browser uses the Chromium
engine. I am using public beta versions of Edge and it is just as
accessible with screen readers as Chrome.
4. I use an addon called Rumola to assist in solving captchas, those
annoying images containing letters and numbers that you are forced to
retype in order to verify that you are really a human as opposed to a
computer-generated program trying to access the site. Because of some
changes made by Firefox Rumola has stopped working with that browser but
it continues to work with Chrome.
In fairness I wouldn't expect Freedom Scientific to mention this.
>Finally, I won't be available for the skillbuilding session, and I
don't use JAWS any more, so maybe I couldn't participate anyway. My
question is: is there any other way I can obtain the valuable kind of
info this session would presumably provide?
You don't need to be a JAWS user to participate in their training webinars. All
of their webinars are archived and can be freely downloaded as mp3 audio files.
Once they post the archive I'll provide the link to download it. Some of what
they have mentioned might be specific to JAWS but some might equally apply to
NVDA as both screen readers use similar keystrokes for navigation. The good
news is that the majority of keystrokes you use in Firefox will pretty much
work in Chrome. One major exception is Chrome's menu. You can just press the
alt key to open Chrome's menu, with down arrow moving through all available
options.
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