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Know Your Software
by Aaron Smith on Tuesday, July 5 2011Here's a "gotcha" you should be aware of. Developers of free software often allay their overhead by allowing sponsors to advertise during their program installations. While this practice itself is perfectly acceptable, some installers are taking a turn toward the inaccessible. More recent installers provide the ability to rotate between several different advertisers instead of a single one. While most of the controls of the installer are easily navigable with the keyboard, embedded controls associated with the sponsor/advertiser are not.
Take PeaZip, for example. PeaZip is a popular "Open Source file and archive manager." During the install, the typical Back and Next buttons, along with most options, are easily accessed with the Tab key. At one point during the install, you'll hear, "Install BetterLinks Recommended by PeaZip." But as you tab around, you'll only find the Back, Next, and Cancel buttons. Reviewing the window with the mouse doesn't provide you with much more. The text associated with the sponsor information is graphical, as are the accept/decline radio buttons. There is no easy way to know whether or not you're installing third party software that you may not want on your machine. Another freeware archive utility, IZArc, has the same kind of limitation during the install, only with a different sponsor.
To add insult to injury, the sponsors can change between installs, even when you're using the same setup file. You're not guaranteed to have the same set of graphical controls each time.
So what's the solution? Contact the developers of these applications, and let them know that portions of their installers are not accessible. If the installers are pulling in graphical content from a remote server, there's no reason they can't pull in accessible content instead. In addition, be mindful of the programs you install. If you're using Windows Vista or Windows 7, go to Programs and Features, and select the "Installed on" column header to sort your installed programs by date to find what was most recently installed. Alternatively, use an uninstall utility like Zsoft Uninstaller to manage installed programs.
In other words, be proactive: make a note of the most recently installed program, and make sure you gave your permission or them to be on your system.
