Getting Started on the Internet

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Chapter 11: Internet Explorer document settings

Already mentioned in a few of the previous topics, with Hal and Supernova comes some advanced document settings for Internet Explorer. These settings are designed to give you greater control over how you interact with a web page and what elements can and should be recognised.

The dialog box containing the available options is found in the Speech menu. Just select Internet Explorer from the Document Settings sub-menu.

The options available within the Internet Explorer property sheet are:

Wait till page loaded

This option, when selected will mean navigation onto the web page in virtual focus mode is prevented until the page has fully loaded. This will prevent accidental straying onto the page while it continues to load. When the page has loaded the virtual focus will be positioned on the first line of the page with the page information announced.

Expand abbreviations and acronyms

These check boxes will determine whether the text on the screen is output or whether the tagged abbreviation or acronym is announced by Hal and Supernova. The related tags are <ABBR> and <ACRONYM> respectively.

Examples of these options in action can be found in the Style and attribute settings topic.

Disable page refresh and disable activex refresh

Some web pages will automatically update themselves after a period of time. This is common on pages containing news articles, sports news, advertisements, etc. The code used by web page designers to cause the page to refresh can either be JavaScript based or HTML based. Currently, it is not possible to prevent a JavaScript page refresh, however, pages that use the HTML META DATA approach can be stopped. Selecting the disable page refresh check box will perform this task.

Page refreshing is an issue because the screen reader identifies a new page loading and, when this happens, the virtual focus is returned to the top of the page. This can make navigating pages impossible as you may only be able to move down a couple of lines before being returned to the top of the page.

Select the link that follows to open a new window that illustrates a page refresh in action. Try to navigate the page with and without this check box enabled and see what happens.

Click here to review a page refresh example.

As you can imagine, page refreshing is something debated on W3C. Current guidelines suggest that web page designers should offer a static page alternative or the ability to disable the refreshing.

Announce tables with borders and announce tables with headings

The role of tables on web pages is varied. They can and often are used for controlling the layout of a page but are also used to display data. The elements associated with the table determines how the virtual focus interacts with the table. Below are two tables, presenting the exact same data but one contains only a border while the other contains no border but does contain heading elements.

Table With A Border

Action	Key Press
Click on a link in virtual focus	Insert
Click on a button in virtual focus	Spacebar

For the table above the <TABLE BORDER=1> element were present. Visually the table contains a border around the cells. This is probably the most common way to display tabular data.

However, some web page designers prefer not to display a border. The table below demonstrates this style of approach.

Table Without A Border

Action	Key Press
Click on a link in virtual focus	Insert
Click on a button in virtual focus	Spacebar

In order for Hal and Supernova to detect they are in a table it must identify the table in another way. In this case, the heading tag is searched for. This is the <THEAD> tag. With the announce tables with headings selected you will be able to navigate through the table in the usual way, that is, cell position will be recognised and table navigation hot keys can be used.

Announce control tooltip label, announce control label and announce control title

These options provide an alternate approach to the naming of controls found within forms. This can be required because, in some cases, the position of the text label to the control is located at a point outside of the screen reader’s detection.

With these check boxes selected the name of the control is extracted from an element of the tag and not from the screen itself.

The control tooltip label is ascertained from the alt tag, the control label is extracted from the label tag and the control title comes from the name element.

In the Forms topic, a good and bad form was provided as a demonstration. Use the link below to return to the bad form and see your results with these announcement options selected.

Click here to go to a less access friendly form.

Show link URLs in the list utility

This check box determines whether the URL appears in the Dolphin list utility or whether only the text is shown. To learn more about the list utility review the topic The Dolphin list utility reviewed in the previous topic.

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