Seb has started building the new bar with a Chrome extension that makes it possible to have persistence so you can view more than one page with the bar staying in place. It works with top pages but even with lower levels it is now easy to toggle the toolbar on and off from the menu bar of the browser. You can also see when it is being used with a small white area appearing around the button.
The download for the Chrome extension is at the moment available from the Google Chrome site, but will soon be available on our new ATbar website. Further extensions or add-ons are planned for the other browsers and once these are tested it will be onto offering more options for the user.
I saw that IE penetration has now dropped to under 50% – is this true of disabled users more widely ? I suspect it is – we certainly see a great many Firefox users and increasing numbers of chrome users not huge use of other browsers however
It is interesting and I have to admit I could not find any stats on user preferences when it comes to the use of AT with the various browsers, but certainly here (University of Southampton) although Internet Explorer (IE) is the default browser on the desktop many folks use Mozilla Firefox or Chrome. Looks like the stats at W3schools.com show the same lower rate of use for IE.
Browser Statistics Month by Month
July 2011 Internet Explorer 22.0 % Firefox 42.0 % Chrome 29.4 % Safari 3.6 % Opera 2.4 %