So this is kind of interesting!

Internet explorer 9 installed in about five minutes without any fuss at all. In fact, it was probably the cleanest and responsive installation I have ever done when it comes to Internet explorer upgrades.

Now, keeping in mind this is a beta, some ofthis could change when the final version is released but so far so good!

What have I noticed so far? Well, this is a short summary.

1. A few shortcut keys have changed..
   Control J no longer brings up the feeds menu for example. this is now replaced with control and g. I have no idea why they didn’t just leave control J for feeds and make control g the download manager. Perhaps it was to standardise with MOzilla’s Firefox but I doubt it some how.
2. All the tool bar buttons are accessible by using the tab and the arrow keys but this was true of the previous version of IE also. What you will notice though is the lack of buttons. Everything is hidden until you need it. The menu bar is not displayed on the screen at all however it is accessible still using the keyboard using alt and f for file, alt v for view alt t for tools etc.
3. The download manager seems to be totally accessible which is great.
4. Notifications are now not presented in dialogue boxes or on the top of the Internet explorer 9 window. It looks like IE are following the example of Firefox again by having all notifications standardised in a small bar that appears on the bottom of the screen. This is a major change and it’s one that Jaws seems to work well with but it’s not as seemless and reliable as the notification method used in Firefox just yet. Who knows, maybe this is something that FreedomScientific is looking into.
5. Pages do seem to load a little quicker.
6. I’m loving the way that the auto complete works in the address and search bar. That’s another thing I’m liking also. the search and search bars have now been mearched into one. This follows the example set by the Google Crome browser some time ago.
7. The jaws cursor does not work at all in the Internet explorer 9 window. This is kind of unusual however may have something to do with the direct GPU rendoring. This may be a show stopper until FreedomScientific, the makers of the Jaws for Windows screen reader resolve this.
8. I was unable to write into edit form controls while writing this blog post until I turned off the virtual PC cursor. This iis definitly a show stopper. I will have to down grade to Internet explorer 8 until this is resolved.

There you have it. It looks like Jaws 12 has some minor support for Internet explorer 9. When you press insert and q it informs you that Jaws 9 scripts are loaded however the lack of Jaws cursor support and the problems with form controls seems to indicate that the support is unfinished or baddly written.

It will be interesting to see what Freedomscientifics response will be to these problems. I really hope they get sorted faster than the other issues that I and others have reported in relation to Jaws 8, 9, 10, 11 and indeed 12.

WE can only but live in hope cant we?

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