Anyone who's been around here for more than the last few days and has been reading my posts already knows I'm a sighted tutor who teaches JAWS, among other assistive technology. I'm just throwing that out there for our newest members.
As anyone who uses JAWS knows, it's a very expensive piece of software and since Freedom Scientific does not offer any discount or free license to people doing what I do (that I know of) there's no way I can justify the expense. I know that I can pick up a copy of NVDA, the open-source screen reader, from nvaccess.org for free. I already have fully functional (but without the high-end voice options) version of WindowEyes as well. What I'm wondering is how similar either one of these might be to JAWS? A friend of mine is a WindowEyes user who can and does occasionally use an older version of JAWS and she glides pretty effortlessly between them and has said that a number of the commands used are the same. There are those times when it would be handy to do some hands-on work by myself in preparation for certain "relatively hairy" systems when I'm going to be teaching someone to use those with JAWS, but since I can't get a copy that remains active for just that purpose I was wondering if either of these other two screen readers might be "parallel enough" to be of some use in getting a feel for how JAWS will work with a given website, etc. Brian
