[gui-talk] An I.E. 8 inquiry:

[James Pepper]

IE 8 uses the new system called ARIA which is a method of describing form
fields under a new standard for accessibility. It makes it possible for
people to claim they are making their content accessible using AJAX but they
don't have to think about the practical aspects of accessible design.   The
problem is nobody really knows how to design for this yet and so even though
JAWS 10 is designed to work in this new format, they have not worked out all
the bugs.  IE 8 does not work with JAWS 8 and has serious limitations with
JAWS 9.

The unfortunate thing is that Yahoo has completely disregarded the blind and
forced IE 8 upon all of its customers.  You have to uninstall IE 8 to get
your screen readers to work properly, that is the only solution.

The big problem here is that designers cannot design webpages for
accessibility under the old standards, they are hardly going to be able to
do it for the new standards.

James Pepper