I am of two minds about the piece that you referenced.

First, I am in total agreement that people should not be using Internet Explorer unless there's a good reason for doing so. The browser just isn't going to keep up with today's Web and many Web sites won't interact properly with Internet Explorer, if at all, and users will find that their experience with IE will be degraded, crippled or nonexistent.

Having said that the Komando article has misquoted the original blog post that it links to. IE is not being retired this November. The blog post states:

"Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11."

The end of support has to do with Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps. While IE's retirement is inevitable the blog post makes it clear that the browser isn't going away totally, at least not now and certainly not this year. The Komando piece is an example of poor and irresponsible journalism. Again, this doesn't mean that I'm encouraging users to stick with IE until its official retirement. Unless you're being forced to use it in a corporate environment or unless you're using a screen reader version that is over ten years old Firefox or a Chromium-based browser will offer greater compatibility with today's Web sites, better performance and equal screen reader compatibility to IE with a far more accessible experience.

David Goldfield,
Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist
JAWS Certified, 2019

WWW.DavidGoldfield.org

On 8/20/2020 8:18 AM, Gene wrote:

Microsoft has officially said that it will no longer support Internet Explorer with security updates in November.  I don't recall the wording and I don't recall if updates will stop at the beginning of November or at the end.
https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.komando.com%2Ftechnology%2Fmicrosoft-kills-internet-explorer%2F750690%2F%3Futm_medium%3Dnl%26utm_source%3Dnotd%26utm_content%3D2020-08-20&data=02%7C01%7C%7C373e86ff2e67473bf62208d845031ff6%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637335227003371146&sdata=I0bJWimCwbyPHgCD9N4A5Fo7%2F8D98KOiHTLtbhY3Iuo%3D&reserved=0

For years, it has been recommended, even by the department of homeland security that Internet Explorer not be used for security reasons.  it has very little market share now.  Yet many blind people continue to use it, evidently because of fear of change.

So here are the choices;
Keep using Internet Explorer as it becomes increasingly dangerous and will slowly work on fewer and fewer sites, or wait until the last moment and then try other browsers under pressure, or try other browsers now and see that the only thing you had to fear was fear itself and give yourself lots of time to learn, not under pressure, the small amount you will have to learn unless you want to change settings in the browser.

For a lot of users, there will be very little to learn.  Browsing is almost completely identical with any browser that supports the Virtual PC Cursor or Browse mode.  You will need to learn to work with book marks differently but, unless you want to change settings, that will be almost the only thing you will have to learn.  There are one or two other things, such as how to change where files download to if you don't want them to download to the default folder.

If you want to work with settings, you will have more to learn.

Gene