Re: [orca-list] Screenreader Accessibility Testers for Ubuntu

[Kyle <kyle free2 ml>]

OK I'll give you that, Jaws is a real winner ... in a "vote for the 
worst" contest. And last I checked, it was waaaaaaaay more than any $90 
or so just to run it. It used to and probably still does cost more than 
most whole computers, OS included, so you would think if price really 
determined value, it should be the best, but it's definitely not. It's 
counterintuitive for end users, and it is even difficult to script for 
new applications. Orca has a clear advantage here, since scripting for 
Orca is done using the quite common Python programming language, and the 
same goes for NVDA.


Just a couple of weeks ago I participated in a study testing a website. 
Unfortunately they did not have a Linux computer with Orca running on 
it. They did have a choice of Jaws or NVDA, and I specifically asked for 
NVDA, as I had recently heard that it was at least somewhat similar to 
Orca these days. The person conducting the study did say that he 
definitely preferred NVDA out of those choices. I didn't exactly feel at 
home using it, but I did notice that it felt a lot more like Orca, at 
least browsing a website, than I thought it would. I couldn't get flat 
review to work like I can do here, but fortunately it wasn't needed. The 
biggest problem I ran into was that NVDA is a real Chatty Cathy, 
presenting tons of useless information by default, sometimes twice, 
which made the website harder to read. And then there was the noticeable 
slowdown that comes from the fact that the whole page has to be copied 
from the browser into screen reader memory, something we just don't have 
to deal with here. Yes, I will grant you that much of the Chatty Cathy 
stuff can be turned off, but Orca just presents that default useless 
information in a much cleaner way, and I find all the stuff that needs 
to be turned off much easier to find in Orca's preferences, although 
that is likely due to the fact that I haven't used anything else on a PC 
other than Orca in more than 10 years.

~Kyle