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

[Devin Prater <r d t prater gmail com>]

$90 per year is the subscription price. I just set up a Windows 11 laptop yesterday morning with no trouble. I used Narrator to install over Fedora Mate, because of aforementioned bugs, opened Microsoft Edge which is now based on Chroium, went to nv-access.org, tabbed to the download link, went through the process of downloading and installing NVDA, installed the Microsoft App package or whatever to get the winget package manager, opened Windows Terminal, installed Google Chrome, VS Code, VLC, Foobar2000, Python3, and so on. This is to just show that if you're used to Linux, anything else will be hard because you don't know it. I've used Linux off and on for the last 7 or 8 years. I know its quirks. They've just, in my opinion, gotten worse after Gnome 2, into Gnome 3 and 4, and now even Mate is starting to give way to the age of its Gnome 2 roots (see Chrome-based apps crashing or when you quit them, Orca is lost).

Devin Prater

r d t prater gmail com

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 8:05 AM Kyle via orca-list <orca-list gnome org> wrote:

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

_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html