I know that Freedom Scientific bashing has been in vogue over the last few years. They are a commercial company and do not appear to have always unstinctingly operate in their customers best interests. Nevertheless I have been, in practice, reliant on their implementations of Jaws since 2006.
As, with others, I have resented the annual upgrage fee I have tried to make the break firstly with experimenting with exclusive use of NVDA on Windows, and then secondly by purchasing an iMac for voiceover usage. Sadly in both circumstances I have had to return to windows and Jaws for serious Office productivity taks. When the pressure is on, and the chips are down, jaws is what I rely upon. I now conclude that in order to retain this productivity edge the yearly Upgrade cost for Jaws is sadly the price I have to pay. There is no feasible way I could nowadays, for example , rely upon Jaws 11, NVDA or voiceover. I cannot comment on Window eyes as I have never used it. Genrally though, with some exceptions, Jaws continues to provide the maximum accessibility for me. Whilst if I had to, I could survive without forking out for Jaws every year, and use NVDA, I would need at least a demo copy of Jaws to assist me with difficult access. The lack of a virtual screen cursor in NVDA means that there are some situations where only Jaws wil do. There are a few happy circumstances where NVDA will outperform Jaws, for example in gaining limited access to the generally inaccessible Calibre Ebook software, but these are the exception rather than the rule. Where access is difficult only Jaws can often solve problems. For example the other week I had an inaccessible interface to deal with , The Adobe Music Importer for the Amazon cloud Player. Using Virtual OCR, and then reviewing the results with the Jaws cursor and performing virtual mouse clicks I was able to get some functionality out of a program which would have been impossible with NVDA or Voiceover on the Mac. It was clunky, requiring me to run OCR multiple times as the screen was updated but I got it to work after a fashion. More importanly, For Office productivity, Jaws and Microsoft Office remains the only serious option for me. I am managing to stick with Office 2003 but I am heavily reliant on Jaws for table management, header and style management, index and content creation and so on. I also have become increasingly reliant on the Jaws text Analyser tool over the last 24 months to produce professional looking output. I know of no screen reader which provides equivalent text analysis functionality, though it is possible Window Eyes does. Certainly NVDA and voiceover on the Mac do not cut the mustard here. It was not until I started to use Text analyser a couple of years ago that I realised the formatting and presentational errors I was creating. My reliance on sighted proof reading has plummetted since I started utilising this and other tools. A similar experience is provided on the web. Whilst NVDA and Voiceover provide feasible web access, and occasionally outperform Jaws, in genral only Jaws will do. The bafflingly complicated and restricted text selection limtations of Safari with Voiceover make it impractical for rapid academic searches. Some elements, including some headers are impossible to select and copy with Voiceover except by using last phrase copied. It is impossible to copy more than a paragraph because of the text interactional limits unless you want to select and copy the entire web page. I could survive with various strategies with Safari and Voiceover but it just takes too much time to flexibly extract the content of web pages I need. NVDA is better and sometimes more stable but I find the fasterst browsing experience remains with jaws. I invested a lot of time looking at the potential of NVDA and voiceover as alternatives to Jaws. In practice still I play with Voiceover and NVDA, but work with Jaws. I wish it were not so and that the fre screen reading alternatives provided feasible office comdpetition that I could rely upon. At the moment they do not. Nobody has ever been able to demonstrate to me that the Mac currently a viable serious Office platform for a blind user, though some limited functionality is certainly possible if your needs are not that great and you are prepared to work at it. I saw only yesterday somebody trying to defend Office functionality on the mac by saying she simply bans people from sending table formatted matgerial to her. This is not a serious response and would be considered eccentric and probelmatic in most of the jobs I have done over the years. It is only a feasible response if you want to remain a non professinal amateur dabbling on the fringes of access. A strategy reliant on instructing the Department of Health not to use tables in the material they sent to me when I was an NHS Manager is so absurd as to be ridiculous. In practice whilst using NVDA on a Windows platform is more feasible than voiceover on the Mac for office usage, it also lacks some crucial tools. David Griffith -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dane Trethowan Sent: 06 April 2013 02:54 To: Windows Access; Share Your Enthusiasm! Subject: The Word Is Out! Okay, I'm not afraid whatever to admit if I'm wrong and I certainly have been wrong when it comes to good Screen Reading software, JAWS and Window-Eyes. I've been using JAWS 13.0 for the last 4 weeks or so and - in my opinion - accessibility to Windows software thanks to JAWS blows GW Micro away and that's a shame as Window-Eyes is far behind in several crucial areas. the most obvious is the Internet browsing facilities, and another is training material - material to help new and old users alike - become familiar with the Screen Reader and associated Windows Applications, concepts etc. Most people on list would know what I'm talking about so I needen't say any more but I will say that I've decided to put my money where my mouth is, I ordered JAWS yesterday. ********** Dane Trethowan Skype: grtdane12 Phone US (213) 438-9741 Phone Australia (03) 9005 8589 ======================================= To post to this group, please send your message to: [email protected] The Windows-Access E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit your personalise subscriber options page, located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/windows-access You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Windows-Access forum at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/windows-access/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> --------------------------------------- [email protected] ======================================= To post to this group, please send your message to: [email protected] The Windows-Access E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit your personalise subscriber options page, located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/windows-access You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Windows-Access forum at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/windows-access/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> --------------------------------------- [email protected]
