Internet Explorer 7 Guide

A guide for Jaws users, written by David Bailes at Chorlton Workshop for hsbp. More guides are available on the Jaws Guides page of the VIP Software Guides website.

Contents

Introduction

This is a guide to the web browser Internet Explorer version 7, running under Windows XP. To use this version of Internet Explorer, you'll need Jaws 7.10 or later, and preferably Jaws 8.0 or later.

The new features in version 7 include:

The first time you open Internet Explorer after you've installed it, you're automatically taken to a web page which has brief descriptions of some of the new features, and which leads to a number of pages where you have to choose a small number of settings. These pages are described in detail in the Customise your settings pages.

On subsequent times, when you open Internet Explorer it displays it's “Home” page. You can set this home page to whatever web page you want, as described in the Browser home page section.

Main Window

This section describes the main window of Internet Explorer, and how to move around it.

Components of the window

First toolbar

The first toolbar contains the following groups of controls:

Normally, you'll move to these controls directly using their shortcuts, but you can move around this toolbar, and the Second toolbar by using standard navigation keystrokes. To move between the groups of controls use TAB and SHIFT + TAB, and to move within the groups use LEFT ARROW and RIGHT ARROW. Note that you can't move to the Back and Forward buttons, the only way of pressing these is to use their shortcuts.

Second toolbar

This section describes the Second toolbar, and can safely be omitted on the first reading of this guide.

The second toolbar contains the following groups of controls:

Moving around the window

Reading a web page

For more information about reading and interacting with the HTML elements on a web page, see the separate HTML guide.

Moving around a web page

For more information on moving around a web page, see the separate HTML Page Navigation guide.

Information bar

The Information bar is used for displaying warnings about security related conditions. When a web page tries to do something that might be unsafe, like install an ActiveX control, open a pop-up window, or download a file, the Information bar appears between the second toolbar and the web page. It contains an brief description of the warning, and often an invitation to click the bar for various options.

After you've installed IE7, when the Information bar appears, a dialog box with the title Information Bar also opens. This asks you whether you've noticed the Information bar. The dialog contains a “Don't show this message again” checkbox, which you'll probably want to check. There's also a “Learn about the Information Bar” link which opens Help at the relevant page. Press ENTER to close the dialog.

When the Information bar appears, then apart from the dialog box described above:

  1. Jaws reads the Information bar.
  2. If you want to move to the Information bar so you can click for options, press ALT + N ( or press F6 three times).
  3. Press SPACEBAR to open a pop-up menu, and choose an option.

There are several ways of moving to another web page:

You can use the Search box, which is on the first toolbar, to search either the web, or often used websites like Wikipedia. It's a convenient alternative to going to the appropriate web page, and using the search edit box on that page.

To search using the Search box:

  1. Press CTRL + E to move to the Search box.
  2. Type in your search terms. (You don't have to go into forms mode to do this, as you're on a toolbar, not on a web page.)
  3. Press ENTER.

When you search using the Search box, you use the search of a particular search provider, like Google or Microsoft's Live Search. When you move to the Search box, Jaws says the name of the current search provider: for example “Live search edit” or “Google edit”. Internet Explorer has a list of available search providers, and you can choose which of these you want to use as your current search provider. In addition, one of these search providers is set as your default search provider: the current search provider is set to this each time you start Internet Explorer.

After you've installed Internet Explorer 7, the list of available search providers may contain only a single search provider, Microsoft's Live Search. However, you can easily add other search providers to this list, as described in the Adding a search provider section below. To view the available search providers, go to the Search box (CTRL + E), and press CTRL + DOWN ARROW to open the Search Options menu. On this menu:

The following sections describe how to change the current search provider, and manage the list of available search providers.

Changing the current search provider

When you move to the Search box, Jaws reads the name of the current search provider. To change the current search provider, with the focus in the Search box, press CTRL + DOWN ARROW to open the Search Options menu, and choose a provider.

Adding a search provider

To add a search provider to the list of available search providers:

  1. Press CTRL + E to move to the Search edit box.
  2. Press CTRL + DOWN ARROW to open the Search Options menu, and choose Find More Providers.
  3. You are moved to a web page which has the title Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately the accessibility of this page could be better. Move to first and only heading on the page. Following this are links for various providers, which you can TAB through. The first few are providers which search the whole web, and this is followed by providers which search particular sites, like Wikipedia. Move to one of the links and press ENTER.
  4. An Add Search Provider dialog opens. The dialog's default button is Cancel, so TAB to the Add Provider button, and press it.

Setting the default search provider

  1. Press CTRL + E to move to the Search edit box.
  2. Press CTRL + DOWN to open the Search Options menu, and choose Change Search Defaults.
  3. The Change Search Defaults dialog opens. The first control is a list of your search providers, where the default provider is appended by the word the word Default in parenthesis. Select the provider which you want to be your default, and then TAB to the Set Default button and press it.
  4. TAB to the OK button, and press it.

Removing a search provider

You can remove a search provider using the Change Search Defaults dialog which was described in the previous section. In this dialog, select a provider, then TAB to the Remove button and press it.

Downloading

When you open a link to a file such as a word document, a pdf, or an application, a File Download dialog opens. The exact form of the dialog depends on the type of the file:

If you've pressed the Save button in either of two dialogs described above, then:

  1. A standard Save As dialog opens. When you're happy with the settings, press ENTER to press the default Save button.
  2. A dialog opens which contains information about the progress of the download. During the download, the title of the dialog is “x% of somename.sometype”, and Jaws automatically reads out this percentage from time to time. When the download is complete, Jaws says 100%, and the title of the dialog changes to Download complete. Note that if the download looks as if it's going to take a long time, you can do other things, and then use ALT + TAB to switch back to the dialog to check whether it's finished. Once the download is complete, you can either press ENTER to press the default Close button, or TAB to the Open button and press it to immediately open the file.

Tabbed browsing

The tabbed browsing feature in Internet Explorer 7 lets you have a number of web pages open at the same time within a single program window, and lets you easily move between these pages. If you don't find this feature useful, you can turn it off, as described in the tabbed browsing options section below.

Each open web page has a corresponding tab button on the second toolbar. When describing tabbed browsing, pages are often referred to as tabs, as in “opening a new tab”. Also, the page with the focus is often referred to as being in the foreground, and the other tabs as being in the background.

Opening tabs

Switching between tabs

Closing tabs

Tabbed browsing options

  1. Open the Internet Options dialog, which is on the Tools menu.
  2. On the General page, press the Settings button in the Tabs section.
  3. The Tabbed Browser Settings dialog opens. There are numerous options, which include:
    • An “Enable Tabbed Browsing” checkbox, which is checked by default.
    • A “Warn me when closing multiple tabs” checkbox, which is checked by default. If this is checked, then when you close the program with more than one tab open, a message box opens with the title Internet Explorer, asking you whether you want to close all tabs. The default button is Close Tabs.
    • A “When a pop-up is encountered” set of radio buttons. By default this is set to Always open pop-ups in a new window, but you might want to change this to one of the other alternatives.

    When you've made your changes, press ENTER to press the default OK button.

  4. You're returned to the Internet Options dialog. TAB to the OK button, and press it.

Favorites center

The Favorites Center, despite its name, is used for opening recently visited web pages and subscribed feeds, as well as favorite web pages. This section gives a brief overview of the Favorites Center, and then the next three main sections of the guide give detailed descriptions of its use for Favorites, History, and Feeds.

The Favorites Center is normally closed, but when opened, it appears below the second toolbar, on the left hand side of the window. The Center contains the following controls:

You can think of the Favorites Center having multiple pages, like a multi-page dialog box. The pages each contain a single control: a tree view of favorites, or subscribed feeds, or recently visited web pages.

Opening and closing the Favorites Center

There are keystrokes for opening the Favorites Center on each of the three pages:

If you use one of these keystrokes to open the Favorites Center and select a web page, then when you press ENTER to open the web page, the Favorites Center automatically closes. If you open the Favorites Center, and then decide you don't want to open a web page, press ESC to close the Favorites Center.

When the Favorites Center is open, and you want to move to a different page, it's easier to use the keystrokes given above than to TAB to the toolbar and press one of the buttons.

Note that it's possible to pin the Favorites Center open so that it doesn't automatically close when you open a web page, but this isn't normally very useful if you're using a screen reader. You can pin open the Favorites Center either by pressing the Pin Favorites Center button in the Favorites Center, or by adding the SHIFT key to the above keystrokes for opening the Favorites Center. For example, if you press CTRL + SHIFT + I this opens the Favorites page of the Favorites Center, and pins it open, and you can close it using the same keystroke. You can also close it by pressing the Close button in the Favorites Center. If the Favorites Center is pinned open, then if you use F6 or TAB to cycle through the components of the main window, then the Favorites Center is included in this cycle, and comes after the second toolbar.

Tree view navigation

You can navigate the tree view in the Favorites Center using all the standard keystrokes for navigating a tree view:

Favorites

If you visit a particular web page often, or want to make a note of a web page for future reference, you can add it to a list of “favorite” web pages. You can then easily open the web page from that list, without having to remember and type in its web address.

Adding a web page to your favorites

  1. Choose Add to Favorites from the Favorites menu (CTRL + D).
  2. The Add Favorite dialog opens. The first control is an edit box for the name of the favorite. By default it's the title of the web page, but if you want, just type in a different name.
  3. Press ENTER to press the default Add button.

Opening a favorite web page

  1. Press CTRL + I to open the Favorites page of the Favorites Center.
  2. In the tree view of your favorites, select a favorite, and press ENTER to open it. If you decide that you don't want to open one of your favorites, just press ESC to close the Favorites Center.

Note that as in Internet Explorer 6, you can also open a favorite web page from the Favorites menu (ALT + A).

Using folders to organise your favorites

If you end up with a large number of favorites, you can use folders to organise your favorites.

You can create a new folder in the Favorites page of the Favorites Center, as described in the next section, or you can press the New Folder button in the Add a Favorite dialog.

To add a web page to a particular folder in your favorites, in the Add a Favorite dialog box, there's a Create in combo box immediately following the Name edit box which you can use to specify the folder.

Managing favorites

First, press CTRL + I to open the Favorites page of the Favorites Center, then:

As well as being able to manage your favorites using the Favorites page of the Favorites Center, alternatives are:

History

To open a recently visited web page:

  1. Press CTRL + H to open the History page of the Favorites Center.
  2. In the tree view of your recently visited web pages, select a web page, and press ENTER to open it. If you decide that you don't want to open one of these pages, just press ESC to close the Favorites Center.

By default, Internet Explorer keeps a list of visited pages for the last 20 days, but this period can be changed in the Internet Options dialog box, as described in the History options section below.

The following sections describe the different views of the visited web pages, how to search them, and history options.

Views

On the History page of the Favorites Center, the recently visited web pages can have the following views:

To change the view of the recently visited web pages:

  1. TAB or SHIFT + TAB to the toolbar of the Favorites center.
  2. Press LEFT ARROW to move to the History split button.
  3. Press DOWN ARROW to open the History menu, and choose one of the views.

Search History

  1. TAB or SHIFT + TAB to the toolbar of the Favorites center.
  2. Press LEFT ARROW to move to the History split button.
  3. Press DOWN ARROW to open the menu, and choose Search History.
  4. In the Search for edit box, type in your search terms, and press ENTER.
  5. TAB twice to move to the list of web pages which have been found, and press ENTER to open one of them.

History Options

To set the number of days Internet Explorer keeps visited web pages in History:

  1. Open the Internet Options dialog which is on the Tools menu.
  2. On the General page, press the Settings button in the Browsing history section of the page.
  3. A Temporary Internet Files and History dialog opens. In the History section, you can change the “Days to keep pages in history” edit spinbox. Press ENTER to press the default OK button.
  4. You're returned to the Internet Options dialog box. TAB to the OK button and press it.

Feeds

Feeds are used by websites to inform anyone who is interested that new content is available. They are also known as RSS feeds, and web feeds.

When a website has some new content, it can put information about this as a new item in a feed, which is just a file which available from the website. If you tell a feed reader, such as the feed reader in IE7, to monitor that feed, then it checks the feed at regular intervals and downloads and stores any new items. Every so often, you can open your feed reader, check whether there are any new items in any of the feeds that you're monitoring, and read them.

Feeds can contain information about different types of new content: News and blog feeds contain information about new articles, whereas podcast feeds contain information about new audio files which are available. Internet Explorer can be used both for news/blog feeds and podcast feeds.

The feeds which a feed reader monitors are known as subscribed feeds, even though normally no money is involved. The following sections describe how to find feeds, subscribe to feeds, and then view and manage these subscribed feeds.

Finding feeds

There are two ways of finding feeds:

When you move to a web page, if Internet Explorer detects that there are feeds available, then:

If you press the Feeds menu button on the second toolbar (ALT + J) a menu opens which contains the available feeds. There are a couple of reasons why there may be more than one feed available on a web page:

Choose one of these feeds, and you're taken to a feed page, where there's an option to subscribe to the feed, as described in the next section.

Subscribing to feeds

If you choose a feed from the Feed menu (ALT + J) or open a link to a feed, then you're taken to a feed page, which contains the feed items which are currently in the feed file on the web.

At the beginning of the page, there's a short section about subscribing to the feed. This is followed by the items currently in the feed, and each item has a level 2 heading.

If you decide that you want to subscribe to the feed:

  1. Either open the “Plus Button Subscribe to this feed” link, which is near the top of the page, or choose Subscribe to this Feed from the Tools menu.
  2. A Dialog opens, which has the title Internet Explorer. The first control is the name of the feed which will appear in your list of feeds. If you want to change the name, just type in a new name to overwrite the existing text. Then press ENTER to press the default Subscribe button.
  3. You are returned to the feed page, and at the top is some text telling you that you've successfully subscribed to the feed.

Once you've subscribed to a feed, Windows checks the feed at regular intervals, and if it finds any new items that it hasn't previously saved, it saves them. A new feed is set to use the default update schedule, which by default is once a day. If necessary you can easily change the update schedule for a feed using the Feed Properties dialog box.

Viewing subscribed feeds

To open a subscribed feed:

  1. Press CTRL + J to open the Feeds page of the Favorites centre.
  2. In the tree view of your subscribed feeds, feeds which have new content are indicated by having the word new in parenthesis after the feed name.
  3. If you're impatient, and want to check whether new content is available for one or more of the feeds since the last automatic update, you can perform a manual update by choosing either Refresh or Refresh All from the shortcut menu of a feed.
  4. Select the feed you want to open, and press ENTER. (Or alternatively press ESC to close the Favorites Center.)
  5. You're taken to a feed page, which contains the saved feed items for your subscribed feed. The structure of this page is described in the next section.

Note that if you read any documentation about feeds in IE7 which doesn't involve the use of a screen reader, then you'll find that IE7 normally indicates that a feed has new content by making the feed name bold. However, in the presence of a screen reader, new content is also indicated by the word new in parenthesis after the feed name.

Feed pages

A feed page contains the following:

If there are new items, then initially only these items are displayed. To view all the items, open the All link near the bottom of the page (ALT + L, then ENTER).

Items in a news/blog feed

Items in a podcast feed

The location of the audio file pointed to by the Open attached file link depends on whether you've chosen to automatically download attached files in the Feed's properties, as described in the Feed properties dialog section:

Searching and Sorting feed items

At the bottom of a feed page there are an edit box and some links for searching and sorting the feed items. The easiest way to move to these is to press E to move the the edit box, and then navigate from there.

Near the bottom of the page, there is:

Searching feed items

  1. Press E to move to the edit box.
  2. Press ENTER to go into Forms mode, and then type in one or more search terms.
  3. Press CTRL + HOME to move to the top of the page, and then use the quick navigation key H to move through the results.

Managing subscribed feeds

First, press CTRL + J to open the Feeds page of the Favorites Center, then:

Feed Properties dialog

You can change the properties of a feed, including its update schedule, using the Feed Properties dialog. To open this dialog, select a feed in the Feeds page of the Favorites Center (CTRL + J), and choose Properties from its shortcut menu. Some of the settings in this dialog are described in the following sections.

Update schedule

In the Update schedule section of the dialog, there's a set of two radio buttons which allows you to choose between the default schedule, and a custom schedule:

Automatically download attached files

Also in the Update schedule section, there's an “Automatically download attached files” checkbox which is relevant for podcast feeds. If this is checked, then Internet Explorer automatically downloads and saves the audio files referred to in the new feed items. If you set this, you'll probably want to change the maximum number of items saved for the feed from the default value of 200, as described in the next section.

If the checkbox is unchecked, an audio file is downloaded from the web when you open a link to an audio file in a feed item, providing that the audio file is still available.

Maximum number of items saved

In the Archive section of the dialog, there is a pair of radio buttons which let you set the maximum number of items saved:

Feed Settings dialog

To open the Feed Settings dialog, open the Internet Options dialog on the Tools menu, and then on the Content page press the Settings button in the Feeds section. Alternatively, the dialog can be opened from the Feed Properties dialog, as described in the previous section.

Default schedule

In the default schedule section, there's an “Automatically check feeds for updates” checkbox, which by default is checked. Following this is an Every combo box, which you can use to set the frequency of the updates. After installing Internet Explorer, this is set to 1 day. If you change the value, then this affects all your subscribed feeds which are set to use the default schedule.

Play a sound when a feed is found

In the Advanced section there's a “Play a sound when a feed is found for a webpage” checkbox. By default it's unchecked, but if you really want to, you can check it.

Internet Options dialog

The Internet Options dialog is a multi-page dialog, and you can open it by choosing Internet Options on the Tools menu (ALT + T, then O).

Some of the options are covered in the relevant sections of the guide:

Browser home page

To set the browser's home page:

  1. Navigate to the web page you want as your home page.
  2. Open the Internet Options dialog, which is on the Tools menu.
  3. The dialog should open on the General page. The first control is an edit box which contains the address of your current home page. TAB to the Use Current button, and press ENTER to change the home page. TAB down to the OK button at the bottom of the dialog box and press it.

Customise your settings pages

The first time you run Internet Explorer 7 after you've installed it, you're automatically taken to a web page which has brief descriptions of some of the new features, and which leads to a number of pages where you have to choose a small number of settings.

The title of this page is Customize Your Settings, and the opening text thanks you for choosing Internet Explorer 7.

  1. Go to the bottom of the page (CTRL + END). Jaws reads the last line as “Choose your settings, clickable on mouse over”. Press ENTER to click this, and you're taken to the next page.
  2. The opening text of the second page is Setup is quick and easy. Read down the page a line at a time. The settings on this page are described in the following steps.
  3. There is one required setting, which allows you to choose your default search provider. There is a set of radio buttons with two options. It's simpler to choose the “Keep my current default search provider” option — if you need to change your default search provider, you can do this later as described in the Search box section. You can set this option using the SPACEBAR without having to go into Forms mode.
  4. There is then the first of 4 optional settings. It's worth setting the first, but you can ignore the other three, which are in fact on different pages. This first optional setting has a checkbox for whether the automatic Phishing Filter is turned on. The Phishing Filter filters out hoax websites that try and trick you into entering important personal details such as bank account numbers. It's recommended that you check this option.
  5. After the Phishing Filter checkbox, there's a clickable graphic which could take you to the other optional settings. Ignore it, and read the following line which is the bottom line of the page. Jaws reads this line as “Save your settings, clickable on mouseover”. Press ENTER to click this, and you're taken to the next page.
  6. The opening text of the the third page tells you that your settings have been saved successfully, and you're ready to go. From now on, when you open Internet Explorer, you'll be taken to your Home page.

Keystrokes

General

Command Keystrokes
Select address bar ALT + D
Select the search box CTRL + E
Open the search options menu CTRL + DOWN ARROW
Go to home page ALT + HOME
Go backward ALT + LEFT ARROW
Go forward ALT + RIGHT ARROW
Go to Information bar ALT + N
Refresh page F5
Stop downloading web page ESC
Cycle through first toolbar, second toolbar, and web page or information bar if displayed F6
Cycle through groups of controls on the first and second toolbars, the Information bar if displayed, and the links and controls on the web page. TAB

Favorites, History, and Feeds

Command Keystrokes
Open favorites page of Favorites Center CTRL + I
Add to favorites CTRL + D
Open history page of Favorites Center CTRL + H
Open feeds page of Favorites Center CTRL + J
Available feeds on a page ALT + J
Close Favorites Center (if not pinned open) ESC

Tabbed browsing

Command Keystrokes
Open new tab CTRL + T
Open link in new foreground tab CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER
Open link in new background tab CTRL + ENTER
Open new tab from Address bar or Search box ALT + ENTER
Switch to next tab CTRL + TAB
Switch to previous tab CTRL + SHIFT + TAB
Open the tab list menu CTRL + SHIFT + Q
Close tab CTRL + W, or CTRL + F4
Close all tabs except current tab CTRL + ALT + F4