Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP<\/em><\/p>\n With every Autumn comes the JAWS beta cycle.\u00a0 This year, being no exception, brings us jaws 17 Public Beta.\u00a0 While it boasts many new features, the exciting one to me is \u201cSmart Navigation.\u201d\u00a0 In a nutshell, Smart Navigation makes JAWS work in a more reasonable fashion with complex webPages and applications which run in the browser platform\u2014think Google Docs.<\/p>\n In order to better grasp Smart Navigation, I have to employ the dream sequence to take us back to the late \u201890s.\u00a0 That\u2019s when the \u201cVirtual Buffer\u201d first appeared in JAWS and made the web much more accessible.\u00a0 Rather than reviewing websites one screen at a time and using clues like highlight for where to click, suddenly, the contents of an entire webpage were brought into a sort of buffer which could be read much like any other document.\u00a0 The arrow keys would read line by line and interacting with various controls became more fluid.\u00a0 The default behavior of the virtual buffer was to make a page more linear in appearance.\u00a0 Links had a line to themselves.\u00a0 Rather than having things appear as they do on screen, there was a sort of \u201cflattening\u201d effect.<\/p>\n This method worked quite well until the web became more interactive. \u00a0Now that it\u2019s hard to tell some web-based applications like Gmail from a desktop-dwelling program, the virtual buffer just doesn\u2019t work so well.\u00a0 In an ideal world, nobody would care whether a document editor or a mail reader was running in FireFox or on a desktop.\u00a0 For now though, things are constrained by the ways in which information is transferred and also how web browsers in general function.<\/p>\n With all that in mind, the idea of Smart Navigation was born. The old virtual buffer just can\u2019t keep up, so based on the nature of the control currently in focus, the function of the arrow keys changes.\u00a0 If you\u2019re in a tagged \u201cmenu bar,\u201d the arrows will move from control to control.\u00a0 Previously, the default would have been to read the name of the control letter by letter.\u00a0 While this behavior is still available, the new paradigm tries to keep things behaving more like an application and less like a flat page of text.<\/p>\n There is also a Smart Navigation mode for tables.\u00a0 The same idea applies, in that jaws assumes you want to move from cell to cell rather than spelling the contents of each cell.\u00a0 This seems to work quite well, and I find Smart Navigation in tables to be a pleasure.<\/p>\n Overall, I think Smart Navigation is a great start.\u00a0 I would like to see the power of Smart Navigation increased.\u00a0 Perhaps menus could be treated as a single control when using the up and down arrows, and their contents explored with the left and right arrows.\u00a0 This could extend to other tagged elements as well. Banners come to mind.\u00a0 I have no doubt Smart Navigation will grow with successive versions of jaws and in time we will wonder how we got by without it, just as we did\u00a0with the Virtual Buffer.<\/p>\n