Re: what kind of screenreader you guys mostly use, jaws?
I used Supernova up until 2017. Its generally cheaper than Jaws, both in terms of price and upgrades and has magnification built in too for those who need it.
The problem is that where in the xp days Supernova was an incredibly versatile screen reader that could handle most anything you threw at it, didn't need scripts or to reformat to work and would let you manipulate the mouse and move through any text based windows no problemm, support for newer operating systems and programs fell off.
Dolphin (the makers of supernova), claimed the program would work with windows 10, so I bought a pc with supernova preinstalled on it in January of 2017, only to find that different bits of the screen were just unreadable, everything from Chrome to windows mail.
When I contacted dolphin about this, expecting an answer of how to fix the problem, or at least that they were aware of the issue and working on it, their attitude was "well its microsoft's fault for microsoft edge and we don't support that"
So, don't use in built windows mail, download windows live mail. Don't use chrome or edge use internet explorer, and never mind the system settings or notification area. Indeed, when I informed them that NVda would! read these things and was used by many people, they said "Well I don't know anyone who uses NVdA full time", which is about the most obvious example of burying heads in the sand I've ever heard.
This is a direct 180 degree shift of the sort of attitude dolphin previously had, rather than giving you a screen reader that would read most anything! they create a screen reader only designed to work with specific programs or bits of the operating system, and then refuse to do anything else.
What was doubly the last straw, is when I looked at the changelog for version 16, a huge amount of emphasis had gone into building things like a music player and audiobook downloader into supernova directly, rather than on things like chrome and edge support or working properly with all parts of the operating system.
I feel genuinely sad about this, I used supernova for close to 20 years, and would often defend its virtues or explain its workings to others, I remember all those times when people were swapping around Jfw or window eyes scripts and I'd just fire up supernova and it'd work out of the box. These days though, Dolphin are simply not interested in marketing to anyone who actually wants to use a computer properly.
I hear they have included Chrome support in version 17 this year, but that is definitely too little too late, indeed they offered me a reduced price on a v17 upgrade and I did not take it.
So, I switched to NvdA and have never looked back. I might have considered Jaws had it been a reasonable price that normal people could actually pay, but I'm not interested in even trying a demo of something I don't have a cat in hell's chance of affording.
On the other hand I'm very happy with NVdA, everything from office support to the way it works with most programs and lets me mess around freely with windows, indeed this is why I still give monthly donations to NVdA because I'm so impressed with what's been done, and continues to be.
My only issue with NVdA is that I do wish it took a bit less by way of system resources and would run without slowdown on laptops, but this certainly isn't a major deal much of the time.
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