RE: Screen Reader Compatibility

How about Hal?  I don't use it because I much prefer JAWS, but I know a few
people who swear by it.  

 

From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andreas Stefik
Sent: 23 January 2010 9:47 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Screen Reader Compatibility

 

Thanks for your thoughts folks,

As for JAWS, the school for the blind we're working with uses it, so no
choice there. It's a pretty common screen reader anyway, so it seemed the
logical first choice. Although, technically, we wrote a self voicing library
for windows first through SAPI. JAWS is just a compatibility issue and
creating code that works with it doesn't take that much time, as Sappy is
ultimately neutral to platform and screen reader.

As for ORCA, I noticed it was only compatible with Gnome, but not KDE. Does
that matter to anyone?

So our order might then be:

Jaws
Voice Over (has to come second because one of our testers is using it)
Orca
Windows Eyes

Any others we should consider?

And finally, we're considering writing a JNI wrapper for our tool that will
auto-detect platform/screen reader and automatically adapt the TTS engine to
its whim in java accordingly. It pretty much works right now in NetBeans
(although isn't available yet), but we can make a little JAR outside of
netbeans if folks want to use it in their projects. That useful to any java
programmers out there? Free and open source, of course.

Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

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