Re: nvda: its achievements over the years and its drawbacks
Good:
NVDA does almost everything I want and it does it in a lightweight, and most notably, free package. Everything I want basically boils down to being a jaws replacement.
NVDA is extremely moddable. If you want to add vocalizer voices to NVDA you don't have to worry about the driver adding extra overhead to the package. This is the beauty of Add-ons and something that JAWS conspicuously lacks; the closest you get to add-ons is custom scripts which are only the NVDA ap modules. The big integration for a bunch of different apps does serve its uses but I personally like installing just what I need and leaving off the rest.
Python scripting language: people who know python can dive right into NVDA scripting without having to read a tedious manual and learn a custom scripting syntax. This is a big one and has really helped to expand the add-on community.
not so good
recognizes fewer controls than jaws: though NVDA is really good at navigating apps when
they use standard controls, it is completely hobbled by apps with nonstandard controls. Jaws users can use window class reassign to try and equate a weird control to one that JAWS knows, and if that doesn't work, they can rely on frames to speak the necessary content. Both of those have user-friendly front-ends which are far easier to learn than scripting, and in a surprising amount of cases it doesn't do a bad job of simulating the control, at least in my experience. Unfortunately NVDA has none of that, which means that your only option is an app module, or, if you are lucky, you might able to read it with OCR. If you're lucky, and sometimes you're not.
I guess it's not quite as snappy as jaws. This is probably because it's coded in python whereas JAWS uses c++. It's still quite fast, and I've gotten used to it, so this isn't much of a problem.
Of course we could talk a long time about apps that JAWS supports that NVDA doesn&#
039;t, and if the need arises people will probably make add-ons for those applications. That's probably something that doesn't really have much point in discussion. The point is that most big-name programs use fairly standard controls, which means that NVDA doesn't really need app modules for them. The more that apps embrace the already used accessibility standards, the less work all screen reader manufacturers will have to do. And I believe that at least for big mainstream programs, that's the trend.
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