I am currently doing a review of all the screen readers that are available. This will take a few months because there are more than you may imagine. Here are some initial observations:
JAWS - Eye wateringly expensive but it's the best there is despite having plenty of shortcomings. Has at least 50% market share. WindowEyes - Expensive but pretty good. Better than JAWS for some applications but not others. Not much different for web browsing. HAL and SuperNova - Similar to WindowEyes. Those three are serious professional products that work to varying degrees with Windows and most applications. Note that you can not use the trial versions for testing. Read the license terms. The trial version is to help you make a purchasing decision. It is not a convenient loophole for people who cannot or do not want to buy it. IBM Home Page Reader - Little used and no longer supported. I don't know much about it. Virgo - I only recently found out about this screen reader and have not used it yet. Thunder - I am not very familiar with this but one of our blind trainers has evaluated it and is not very impressed. It has potential but the creators need funding to improve it. The creators say it is not intended for reading web pages directly. You are supposed to use it in conjunction with Webbie, which creates a linearised version of the page but also removes semantic structure. VoiceOver - Comes with Mac OS X 10.4 and above. All OS X applications have some level of support. I am pretty unimpressed because for instance it does not announce the presence of any semantic structure such as headings and lists, and all keyboard controls require 3 keys, which gets tiring. It has a tiny but strong following but these appear to be typical Apple fanboys who would never admit it was less than perfect even if it crashed every two minutes. Also they have few alternatives. Narrator - Built into Windows 2000 and XP and works to some extent with all applications. Only really any use for getting you out of trouble if your primary screen reader fails. On web pages it only reads the links. Fire Vox - Free extension for Firefox. I have tested this extensively and corresponded with its creator, who has been very helpful. However, it is really just a pet project and it is a long way short of being usable as a primary screen reader. The user experience is nothing like JAWS. If you're looking for a free screen reader it's better than nothing but don't imagine you're getting the equivalent of one of the big 3. Fangs - Don't bother. It claims to produce a text version of what JAWS would read but there are some significant shortcomings. Firstly the behaviour of JAWS varies from version to version; which version is it emulating? The biggest issue is that it doesn't remotely give you any idea of the user experience. Assessing the comprehensibility of a page involves much more than simply knowing what words will be spoken. It would help if the text was laid out in an approximation of the mental model the user will build but frankly it's not worth the trouble. The problem with most of the cheap or free screen readers is that they don't convey semantic structure and the user experience is nothing like the big 3 professional products. Steve Green Director Test Partners Ltd / First Accessibility www.testpartners.co.uk www.accessibility.co.uk -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matthew Smith Sent: 12 January 2007 22:36 To: [email protected] Subject: [WSG] Free Screen Readers (was: Logo and H1's) Quoth Rob O'Rourke at 01/13/07 08:25... > I've not managed to get a screen-reader working very well for testing > so far, does anyone know of one (preferably free) that provides a > fairly typical screen reader experience? > > JAWS is a bit out of my price range. You could try the Fangs[1] extension for Firefox. Fangs renders the page as text, but the text that would (probably) be spoken by Jaws. I have never managed to get it working myself, but it may be worth a look. Cheers M References 1 - <http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs> -- Matthew Smith IT Consultancy & Web Application Development Business: http://www.kbc.net.au/ Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
