I use NVDA exclusively.I have never used Jaws and would never pay the price tag associated with it even if I could afford it.
NVDA has advanced in recent years and I don't understand why some people insist they simply could not do their job without Jaws. Computing is one area where "there's more than one way to skin a cat" is certainly very true and if one way involves paying a thousand pounds just to do what sighted people take for granted, but skinning it another way means using a free Open Source screen-reader, then I'll do that.
Yesterday I installed the latest beta of Apache OpenOffice and there's now no reason to carry on using MS Office. Although NVDA works well with MS Office the OpenOffice suite now means there's no need to use commercial software at all apart from Windows itself.
NVDA has the major functions covered: 1. Firefox for web browsing. 2. Thunderbird for email. 3. OpenOffice for office functions.IMHO Freedom Scientific only survive by almost giving their over-priced product to schools and colleges knowing that as students grow up they will want to stick with a familiar product and will then have to pay the price tag.
I don't need to remind the list which other type of vendor is in the habit of giving new customers their first few samples free in the knowledge this will soon have them scurrying back, pound notes in hand.
And computer users who insist in trolling out the maxim "you get what you pay for" have not ever had to ring a certain Worcester-based access technology vendor only to be told by the help-desk that they don't know the answer to the question and anyway, give us more money.
Mike On 25/03/2014 09:27, Jonathan H wrote:
This is two questions in one. If you reply and you are in the UK, I'd be interested to know what screen reader you use, and also what you think most other people in the UK might use. I'm sighted but occasionally fire up a reader to test accessibility changes to web pages but I am struggling to make ARIA live regions and progress bar elements work satisfactorily in multiple browsers and readers. I am running a reasonable specification Windows 8.1 desktop with plenty of RAM and I installed/updated the current versions of what I think would be the 4 major readers. Here is what I found: JAWS 15 was the worst for almost everything - it slowed down my PC, the default voice was the worst of the bunch, and it wouldn't work with Google Chrome at all. In fact, starting Chrome and JAWS together almost brought my PC to a halt. In its favour, it seemed to handle ARIA live regions and progress bars OK when used in conjunction with Internet Explorer 11 or the current Firefox. NVDA 2014.1 was next and immediately became my favourite - it's come on so far since I last tried it a year ago. Incredibly intuitive, just works right out of the box and read the live regions perfectly. Not only that, but the audio cue for any progress bar on the page with an active ARIA progress cue is to play bleeps over what seems to be about 2 octaves, without interrupting the reader itself. So a thoughtful designer could set the bar to update every 10 seconds, meaning the user could carry on reading without interruption, but also get a cue as to progress. Google Chromevox was also intuitive extremely fast, and came with a good selection of high quality voices. It handles live regions well but annoyingly it doesn't seem to give the audio cues of the progress element, even with ARIA cues enabled, unless you have the focus on the progress element and keep tapping the CTRL key each time you want an update, at which point it reads the percentage. Windows Eyes was slow and I cannot make head or tail of it! Everything I do just say "left" or "right" or reads the characters.. Will have to work on this one a bit! To summarise, I absolutely love the new version of NVDA, but of that is the opinion of a sighted user interested only in testing web pages within a browser. And I know not everyone uses it. So my question is firstly, are there UP TO DATE comparison tables of major screen reader WAI browser accessibility implementations. Also, is there a sort of all-in-one super cheat sheet of major screen reader hotkeys for use in browsers? I've Googled around but can only find quite old versions of the feature comparison tables. Finally, I know there are more specific screen reader groups, but I'm interested to know what screen readers people use and prefer in the UK and this is a UK-centric accessibility group, so I hope it's close enough! More info on ARIA live regions if you are interested: http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Surfs-Up/AriaLiveRegions.htm. Thanks. ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq
-- Michael A. Ray Analyst/Programmer Witley, Surrey, South-east UK Ham Radio Call-sign: G4XBF, licensed since 1982 The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux Raspberry VI: http://www.raspberryvi.org/ NVDA, the best free screen-reader in the world: http://www.nvda-project.org/ ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq