2011-07-03 16:06:07

Hey guys, as someone who doesn't actually use a screen reader except to test games, it took me a while to understand why people have preferences for specific screen readers.  When you're only using them to hear spoken text, which is what I was doing, they are all pretty much the same.  The real difference seems to be, how they are controlled.  I'm not sure if anyone has wondered this in the past, buy why can't something free, like NVDA, be set up to behave exactly! like Jaws?  If the key commands were all identical, wouldn't that allow Jaws users to feel comfortable using NVDA, or NVDA users to switch over to Jaws (if done in reverse)?

If there is some reason that this wouldn't work, I'd be curious to know.  If it only required changing over the key assignments, I think it could be very valuable to have a converter tool that would take a new screen reader and make it behave exactly like your current one.  Many people here, already seem to jump back and forth between 2 screen readers so that they can use games which only support one of them.  I think a tool like this would give everyone that same freedom, and actually quite a bit more.

- Aprone
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2011-07-03 16:31:10

The differences come in how they handle trickier situations. As an example Jaws has the Jaws cursor which emulates a mouse, essentially turning the program window into a flat document which you can arrow around and use the numpad / to left click or the numpad * to right click. By contrast NVDA uses the object navigation, which is an entirely different way of thinking about things. The object navigation works more like a tree with the top level being the current window, then filtering down through the levels.

cx2
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2011-07-03 16:38:59

When it comes to basic controls, Jaws and NVDA are about the same. It's things like the jaws cursor and scripting and such where the differences become more significant.
One that I noticed right away is that NVDA doesn't seem to have an option for some / most / all / none on punctuation; it only seems to be all or none. On the other hand, NVDA lets you toggle this with one keystroke, whereas Jaws takes a few more.

Then there's stuff that doesn't have to do with the interface, but how the programs work. NVDA seems to do much better with high CPU usage than Jaws. Jaws becomes unresponsive much more often than NVDA on that front (if NVDA goes unresponsive, it usually crashes entirely and needs to be task manager'd / restarted).

And... ur... Etc. ^_^

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    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-03 16:58:22

Hmm, sadly then, it seems like just changing key commands isn't going to help much.  Well.  Haha, I guess that blows my idea out of the water!  smile

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-03 18:09:55

It sounds nice in theory, yeah, but if screen readers were that similar in principle, there wouldn't be so many of them, both commercial and free ones, both worldwide and locally available ones. :-) (By locally, I mean a specific country. In this case, the screen reader usually doesn¨t develop enough to raise internationnal interest, or doesn¨t support localization at all.)
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2011-07-03 19:12:17

And about NVDA, it looks like someone hasn't been keeping up with its developement. :-) It does now support none/some/most/all punctuation, with an option to specify which punctuation is spoken in a level. It now has flat review, which is like the Jaws curser.

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2011-07-03 19:21:31

Hm, I downloaded NVDA I think in May. I don't remember whether it was the latest stable version at the time or the latest beta... Hm.

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MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-03 21:17:19

If it was realy that simple then I'm sure someone would already have included an alternative hotkey set sadly, I know the OCR package Kurzweil had an option for its hotkeys called "screen reader layout" which made navigation through a scanned document possible with the same numpad based hotkeys as Jaws uses for example. Or at least it used to back when I used it.

The cynical might suspect some of this differentiation was purposeful to make you afraid to try out different screen readers. A lot of it does just boil down to general behaviour though.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2011-07-04 00:39:18

JAWS and NVDA are really quite different. I'd venture to say that JAWS is the most unique screenreader ever based on the way it does things.
JAWS became  the most popular screenreader for windows because they were first to support office back in the day. The way they did it was actually making their own video driver, grabbing the screen contents and making inferences about what was going on based on colors and I'm sure even pixel locations. Later Microsoft developed Active Accessibility which screenreaders can use to aask about controls without having to hijack the video ddriver. JAWS still uses it's own video driver to provide access to some apps which lots of other screenreaders have problems with. Nowadays lots of programs use active accessibility by default so it's not so crucial for JAWS to grab everything sent to the video driver. Nowadays the disadvantages of using JAWS outweigh the benefits. Since JAWS has spent the past 20 years being haccked to support new programs quickly it's really prone to crashes. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was still code in JAWS 2.0 in the latest 12.0 version. NVDA however is designed to be fast and accurate. They've recently added a GDI hook which provides some  video info but I hope NVDA never actually provides its own video driver. That just causes more system instability than it's worth.

James

2011-07-04 11:03:37

That explains why system updates in XP would cause jaws 5-7 to stop working... o.o

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"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-04 11:08:10

Worth saying that in windiws 8 Microsoft is removing display mirroring. In other words, those video drivers wwill just not work anymore. Tomi, one of the members of the forum, did a check accessibility wise... and JAWS had the most issues since it relies very heavily on that video driver.

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2011-07-05 18:04:45

well, the thing that i know is jaws goes crazy and slows down and gets weak with most GUI softwares

don't know about NVDA though, never tryed it

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2011-07-05 18:42:13

windows 8?

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.

2011-07-06 01:28:40

Yep. Microsoft just can't stop reinventing the wheel.

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"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-06 13:41:21

I love NVDA. I am seriusly considering uninstalling jaws 12 on my vista computer and just running NVDA like on my XP netbook i have laying around.

2011-07-06 13:53:27

Well, Jaws is still useful enough for me that I'm still using the demo of Jaws10, especially if I need the jaws cursor for something, but those things don't happen too often, so I spend much more time with NVDA now.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-06 18:07:28

Well; NVDA is great for a free screen reader but there are things that Jaws has that as far as I'm aware of; NVDA doesn't. E.G I use excel very frequently, and jaws allows you to define a row containing column titles and vice versa. That feature is invaluable when navigating spreadsheets dozens of rows and columns wide. As far as I'm aware, NVDA doesn't have this.

I hope that one day, NVDA can replace or even surpass jaws. The things that were introduced in jaws 12 weren't really revolutionary. I don't use text analyzer or the word index or even research it for that matter; the only reason I got it was because it fixed lots of issues with office 2010.

2011-07-07 11:29:25

As I understand, NVDA is more compatible with some games like Aprone's ones. I don't like jaws for that demo thing. But I am using jaws in my laptop, NVDA on my mini book. I think jaws giving errors in more computers like my mini book.

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2011-07-07 13:58:04

Oh yeah! NVDA doesn't intercept the arrow keys the way jaws does, so you don't have to close it to play games that use them!

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.