Re: Why I prefer NVDA over JAWS
I talked to VFO/freedom scientific sales yesterday and they now offer a Jaws license for the most current version for 90 dollars a year. That's about what microsoft office costs, I believe. Is it too late in the game for their motives to be anything other than making a profit however they can? Probably. Will I spend the money even though I really can't afford to and even though NVDA works about as well for most things and better for a few? Probably, unless I can get it payd for first. Here's why.
1. Maybe this is personal preference, but the jaws and especially invisible cursor seems much more powerful than NVDA's object review and most power users, even those I've talked to who've ditched Jaws, tend to agree. If I'm opening a random app I've never seen before, I'd much rather have the flexibility of being able to route jaws cursor to PC, route PC to jaws, use my invisible cursor if none of those are working, etc. Maybe I don't understand NVDA's object review as well as I should, although it's been my primary screen reader for years, but in a pinch when I have a screen that normal navigation can't handle Jaws often works better.
2. Jaws has more reliable Braille display support, and I'm fortunate enough to have access to a Braille display. NVDA frequently can't handle my Braille display and I have to do the disconnect/restart/maybe disable and reenable add-ons dance. It's worth it for me to have a stable program that won't make me do this every day, and perhaps more crucially has support that can help me fix bugs that do crop up. I've talked to NVDA contributors about my Braille Display issues and basically gotten a "We're sorry, best of luck because we can't replicate the issue," response. That's understandable given NVDA's open source model, but it's still annoying.
3. Most importantly, it makes lots of professional work legitimately faster. I worked at a call center for a while with NVDA and the way it reads complicated tables is ever so slightly slower than JAWS, the way it lays out web pages is just a tad more cumbersome, not so much that I noticed in personal use... but when I switched over to JAWS, just on a whim, I was all of a sudden making 1-2 more calls per hour consistently. Verbosity settings for web browsing are just slightly more customizable, the way JAWS reads web content seems just a tad more efficient in a way I can't quite articulate...but I can tell you, as someone who's mostly used NVDA for years and knows both screen readers fairly well, people pretty much universally noticed I did my job faster with JAWS. Is that always going to be true in every situation? Of course not. Is it enough for me to make damn sure I have Jaws around for times when that extra boost might be critical? Most likely yes.
In short, they both have their place and neither one's going anywhere. NVDA is robust, competitive, and able to do pretty much anything JAWS can do, sometimes better. I do, however, think it's very telling that pretty much all the schools, government agencies and companies I know of, at least in the states, still subsidize JAWS. At this point it's not just a matter of the good old boys club making sure all the right backs get scratched; people like saving money, and by now if NVDA really was capable of replacing JAWS JAWS would be gone. The two programs have been basically at parody for over five years, a lifetime in the software development world. If NVDA really made JAWS unnecessary don't you think VR and all the rest would've just stopped paying all those extra thousands of dollars to give their tight budgets some wiggle room? Companies especially are all about cutting costs as much as they can get away with and they're still mostly paying for JAWS.
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