3.1 GMail:
Googles’ GMail is recognised as one of the first uses of the AJAX method. It is a web based application to handle your email. To an able bodied user Googles’ GMail is considered a very useful application. Compared to other standard web mail solutions GMails mail box is more responsive when opening mail and processing it. This is due to the dynamic AJAX that happens in the background. This improves the performance and creates a desktop-like application running in the web browser.
Accessibility issues:
The biggest issue to GMail with its accessibility occurs with the use of screen readers. Turning off the css reveals the page structure and displays a series of frames. When initially read out by a screen reader it is hard to understand what is on the page. This is due to the use of Frames and the document structure. The link to switch to basic HTML is also at the end of the page and is hard to locate when using the keyboard to navigate. This requires the user to scan through a large amount of information to be able to access it in an appropriate format.