2017-02-14 06:59:49

e So, as people might gather, I'm seriously trying out Nvda, possibly with an idea of switching perminantly.
The reasons for this are entirely due to firstly, inequities I noticed with Supernova, and secondly the attitude of Dolphin, (or at least that particularly surley dolphin emplloyee), when i confronted them with the problems.

I've  used supernova for close to 20 years,  know it inside out, have tried beta versions and run everything under the sun with it. What I've always admired in Supernova above all, was the way that it would pretty much work with  anything I threw at it so long as there was readable text from random little chat programs,  config options for graphical games, to performance on nearly any sort of websites or sets of controls, including complex things like flash interfaces, (people will remember my smugglers reviews).
When I decided to get a windows 10 machine, I phoned dolphin and was assured that yes, Supernova supported windows 10, indeed I bought the machine through dolphin themselves.

However, I get the machine, and while basic  management and  even the start menu are fine, not to mention very decent performance with everything you'd expect online, from Amazon to youtube, intigration wiht some of the more diverse parts of windows were getting clunky. These settings included search functions not working correctly, long names getting chopped off, and problems with login screens for things like twitter, facebook, weather etc, even when the aps  themselves would work  once configured.
the last straw of this was the default windows mail ap,  where only the basic header controls were read, and actual email messages were not.
This is not the sort of behaviour I've come to expect from supernova, the screen reader which, as I said, used to read anything with readable text.

So, I phone dolphin and ask and what am I told?

"Well it's microsoft edge, we can't support everything, we're a small company"

Even when I pointed out that narrator, ---- yes, narrator! of all things was doing things supernova couldn't, eg, reading login, screens I was just told "Well you need to look at the list of supported programs on our website"
When I stated "What about Nvda and their support of windows 10", he simply said "well you know more about that than me", and effectively refused to listen.

In fairness I suspect I got a particularly surley tech support guy, and someone more reasonable might have been a little more reasonable too, however it is Dolphinn's design decisions here which worries me.
where in the past their thinking was to create a screen reader that  would work flawlessly with all aspects of windows and would work with as much as humanly possible, their thinking now has scaled back to "Well we only need to support a few programs", usually the popular things like office, skype etc, and everything else is the fault of the user for not looking at what we support.

The man did say support  for firefox was planned, however  again, I don't like the thinking here, supernova is in such a state where it will  literally only work with stuff that Dolphin themselves support.
Even in the past, Supernova would work with firefox, just not half as easily as with internet explorer.

It's ironic, because dolphin now seems to  have adopted exactly the same thinking that  they used to cryticise other screen reader companies for, namely, marketing only to a specific set of programs and specific set of users, rather than trying to create something as flexable as possible.  Indeed even before I tried Nvda, I was rather perplexed by several extra functions built into supernova, such as a podcatcher and media playback, as if Dolphin expect people to rely on Supernova only  for everything, rather than have a screen reader which is  flexible enough to give a choice.
Of course, trends can change, I do intend to phone Dolphin, see if I can get to speak to someone more reasonable and explain the  situation. It might be they get their act together in terms of  widening their  field of focus, ---- I do recall back with version 5 they were slower at full scale internet support than some other companies. I'll also keep version 16 of supernova around and see what comes in terms of support, though for the time being I'm quite liking Nvda.

Btw, interestingly enough, I've heard similar things about Window Eyes from my lady, though what state it is in I'm not sure not being familiar with it myself.

While I will appreciate people's thoughts on this subject, I will ask people to please keep the  acrimony to a minimum.
This isn't intended as simply a "lets all call dolphin/freedom scientific/whoever rude names" type of affair.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-14 07:06:43

I would expect such behavior from companies like Freedom Scientific, not Dolphin. Although I've never used Supernova, I think it's stupid that they're now having the attitude that IBM had regarding the IBM PC and printer compatibility ("If you don't use an IBM printer, it won't work.") ...Or maybe that was apple, I can't remember at the moment.

“Can we be casual in the work of God — casual when the house is on fire, and people are in danger of being burned?” — Duncan Campbell
“There are four things that we ought to do with the Word of God – admit it as the Word of God, commit it to our hearts and minds, submit to it, and transmit it to the world.” — William Wilberforce

2017-02-14 08:04:16

That is true Blindncool.
Dolphin have always been good to deal with in the past, everything from customer support to taking suggestions. Indeed, both my brother and I got to be fairly well known at Dolphin. We had a good relationship with them, for example they pretty much said that everytime we needed a new license, even if outside the usual license count we just had to ask, they once, back in the days of xp and posted install disks courier delivered my brother a spare laptop to his university when his crashed just before an exam.

To an extent I do wonder if part of this was the rather surly fellow I spoke to, however there is denying that his comments are born if you look between the lines at feature list for the latest supernova version, eg, I assumed that "Increased desktop support for Windows 10" also counted aps, setup etc, but it seems to just mean the desktop itself.
That is why I will try to talk to them again, and make them aware of just what the situation is.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-14 08:45:49

Mmm-hmm. Had to happen, eventually.

I wouldn't discard it outright. You need at least one "screen-scraping" screen reader. But you're right, Supernova, while very awesome in very many ways, is a highly traditionalist screen reader that only moves when it has to, despite its excellent technical foundations. One wonders what OS Dolphin employees themselves use. They do indeed have pretty wonderful people working for them (I know at least one of them, and went to work for them at one point which I thoroughly enjoyed) but I think the reality is that now they seem somewhat disillusioned.

I wouldn't encourage you to spend your time fruitlessly, but maybe you should at least give the other known screen readers a try, NVDA of course but also (shudder) JAWS and, if you've got an Office license of any kind, Window-Eyes which is now free.

Just myself, as usual.

2017-02-14 08:50:05

Hi.
I don't have much experience with Supernova. I gave it a try many years ago, but found no reason to continue using it, because at this time, Jaws worked in more of my programs than Supernova.
NVDA is an awesome screenreader for sure. I've used it every day in like 3 years. If NVDA does what you need, then skip Supernova. However, a lot of screenreaders have issues with Microsoft Edge, so don't blame Dolphin on that. Microsoft Edge simply sucks. Internet Explorer is still in Windows 10. It's just a matter of setting this as your default browser.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
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2017-02-14 09:50:45

@Sebby, I'm certainly not going to chuck supernova away, after all I paid for it, and it's entirely possible in the future there will be something that Supernova works with that Nvda doesn't.

As far as other screen readers go, well my experience with Window eyes hasn't been good. My lady had a machine with it on, and it was a miner disaster, one reason she  switched to supernova in the first place.

Jaws, hmmm,methinks we'll leave that one alone for now.

@Slj, Supernova used! to work very well with most programs as I said, though rather a matter going and finding stuff sometimes.I do know, indeed I knew before I took the windows 10 machine out of the box that Microsoft was a joke, and indeed other than once out of curiosity I've not run it (I've been using ie).

bit that didn't seem to make sense though, is that the guy at dolphin basically gave "Microsoft edge" as the excuse for why things like settings dialogues weren't reading correctly, or why the in built mail system wasn't working.

This didn't seem to make sense to me either, not judging by the factNVda from what I've gathered isn't great with edge, but is fine in terms of windows 10 support in other stuff.

The sad thing is I have a nasty feeling that the chief reason Supernova isn't! as good as it used to be is exactly Dolphin's attitude here, since if people weren't prepared to push in terms of what supernova would and wouldn't do,dolphin would stop trying.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-14 09:54:17

I'm not surprised. It seems like all the commercial screen reader developers are behaving like this nowadays. All I'll say is that I'm happy with the current state of accessibility on Windows. I've been using NVDA exclusively since late 2012 and haven't given any thoguht to commercial readers. Now that I think about it, the only reason anyone in their right mind would continue to pay exorbitant prices for these products is to gain access to a very specific application using scripts. I'm not going to go on a rant about the stupidity of using scripts to make applications more usable, but let's just say that the developer should do the work to fix the application permanently. I think these screen readers will either have to improve substantially or they will be left behind as Microsoft continues to improve Narrator.

If you use Narrator and NVDA, you will never pay another cent for the same access that your peers get for free. Apple was the first company to push this philosophy and after a very long delay, Microsoft is finally doing the right thing as well. Speaking of paying, do you need to pay for upgrades for Supernova?

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2017-02-14 10:41:17

@Chris, As I said, once upon a time, supernova was good for access by providing accessibility to most things, and mostly that access wasn't by specifically written scripts, since script files in supernova tend to be far more minimal than in many other screen readers. One reason I could pull it out and do random things with it that didn't require scripts, since quite a lot of the time you would spend your time activating the dolphin curser and wandering the application, seeing what was what..

Narrator does seem surprisingly usable at this point in a lot of native Windows things,  nvda is still far superior it seems or at least at the moment.

It's a little sad since I do remember where Supernova used to be, but there you go. Actually my wife was commenting that all the commercial readers seem to be going this way at the moment. It's a shame, since you'd think the emphasis here would be to create something   more flexible than likes of Nvda, not less.

As far as Supernova goes, once you've bought the license, you have to pay full version upgrades, while at about a hundred pounds they're expensive, they're not stupidly expensive, being that new versions generally come around every 18 months or so, while sub versions are all free and tend to get released every few weeks to a month apart.

I absolutely agree on the access philosophy though. Whatever else you say about Apple, they definitely had the right idea in terms of building a screen reader into the operating system directly.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-14 11:14:16

FWIW, I have and maintain a license for all of the screen readers now (I got a head start from Dolphin courtesy of my work experience there). I can honestly say that, even today, every screen reader has its upsides and its downsides. Yeah, at the moment my primary environment is still OS X, so that reaffirms the general principle that accessibility APIs are the future, but I don't think I'm quite ready to accept that the zenith of accessibility is achievable by using this method. As long as there are situations on any given platform where leaping into the dark can leave you without accessibility, then comprehensive accessibility is not yet achieved. Windows, for all its faults, began with nothing, leaving a complex (and broken) ecosystem of accessibility workarounds, which work at the worst of times to give you some level of practical accessibility.

@Dark: Window-Eyes, like Supernova, has its adherents. I was a big fan, and although I feel it's lost out in some important respects (which it appears to be gaining ground on again) it is and always was a bit of a power drill. You really wanted to read all its documentation just so you could get maximal efficiency out of it. If it is not for you, that's fair enough.

Just myself, as usual.

2017-02-14 12:12:18

I am the one of the oldest NVDA users, but I've started using it fulltime since 2010 with no other screen reader installed. Recently I had to install licensed copy of Jaws 18 for another person, and I couldn't believe when I've discovered that JAWS 18, which is a comertial screen reader, does *NOT* work with Microsoft Edge! Come on! I really couldn't believe that, because NVDA in 2016.4 version already supports Edge, and they are moving that support even further in 2017.1 to improve it and prepare it for Windows 10 Creators Update.
However, the best screen reader for working with Edge is of course Narrator, and currently Narrator is getting closer and closer to become very usable screen reader, which is something that many people were waiting for. In Creators Update, Narrator already supports braille, and you will be able to start it out-of-the-box during Windows installation, which was quite known and normal over the years for Mac and Linux users.

2017-02-14 16:49:31

@Seby I don't particularly know in terms of window eyes if the problem I had, problems which were pretty  disasterous, were due to my inexperience, the fact that the computer it was installed on was a right royal mess (it literally self destructed soon after),the fact that I was attempting to setup things for my lady, who'd previously used Window eyes, but only a copy configured for her by someone else and was running into massive trouble,   some combination of those factors, or window eyes itself.

Suffice it to say however that I wasn't overly encouraged to continue experiments.

This isn't a bash at Window eyes specifically, just a note as to why I pretty much wouldn't consider trying it again unless Nvda ran into similar problems to supernova.
that I think in terms of screen reader choice is a factor, since it's often easier to continue with something than to change, and rather like Kuhn and paradigm shifts changes only occur when the current paradigm has enough  inconsistencies.

However, this does seem to be happening with some screen readers.

I'll say supernova has some experimental support for Microsoft edge and more is planned, though I didn't buy the argument that trouble in  native windows 10 was specifically due to Microsoft edge.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-15 16:38:08 (edited by pitermach 2017-02-15 16:40:28)

To an extent, the Dolphin rep was right. Windows 10 does use the new web rendering engine that was developed for Microsoft Edge, though it's really not too much of an excuse.

One thing that could definitely trip up older screen readers in Windows 8 and newer is that due to increased security you can't just scrape the screen anymore. So if you go into a modern app, and then go into the JAWS cursor or nvda's flat review, it will just show a blank screen and I suspect the Dolphin Cursor would do likewise. The thing is, all the modern API's to get the screen content, mostly UIA and MSAA for older software, will still work fine. This is why NVDa or JAWS work fine with the more modern windows parts, because for them scraping the screen is now a secondary means of screen reading. It did seem like Super nova was behind everyone else in that aspect, I heard from someone once that Super Nova stopped reading critical parts of the screen after a sighted person changed the Windows 7 visual theme to something other than Windows Classic. In the late 90's, when Microsoft wasn't implementing their own accessibility API's this could happen because screen readers  were looking for specific graphics and colourrs to track the focus or figure out what kind of control something is. But if you hear something like that in 2014 or whenever it was well, that means there's something wrong.

Honestly every Screen Reader now days has problems. Window-eyes has been slowly rotting away after the VFO Ai-squared merge and I won't be surprised if they just give people jaws licenses and migrate everyone over. Everything has issues, even NVDA which is why I'm really happy narrator is making as much progress as it is (braille, talking Windows install, web support in edge actually starting to feel good, etc). If I had to choose the best Screen Readers we have now it'd have to be NVDA, JAWS and Narrator. They're all good at different things - JAWS is occasionally faster than NVDA IE on the web, but is more invasive in the system, NVDA tends to occasionally freeze up if an app becomes unresponsive or a website has a lot of scripts on it, while Narrator just needs a bit more polish with its web support and how it reads certain controls. But if it keeps its rate of changes up I might very well see myself switching to it in the next year or 2.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2017-02-15 17:45:51

Likely because  Dolphin don't have as much cash as the likes of freedom scientific, Supernova has tended to have a late development schedule, but generally, at least up until windows 7 they seemed to get there in the end often as I said in a way that gave a larger range of freedom terms of other applications etc. This is exactly what happened between versions 5 and 6 back in early 2000's with internet access.

The problem however is that I assumed version 16 which advertises windows 10 support meant support for the operating system itself, including many of the default things that windows actually can do such as mail, not selective support for the bits of the system which dolphin happen to want to deal with and effectively telling people get what their given and like it when questioned.

In fairness Dolphin does freely state support for the Microsoft edge browser is a work in progress, but they don't then explain that this affects other parts of windows 10, and looking at changelogs for recent versions it seems that their primary focus has been on providing extra (and rather pointless), internal program functions for supernova rather than expanding the range of things Supernova can do.

I assumed this was because their "support of windows 10" was complete, now I'm concerned  their falling into a style over substance  approach, particularly because at least in theory, they have been working on windows 10 support for the last three versions, ever since they totally dropped xp support in version 14.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-15 18:11:55

This probably makes the achievements of NVAccess all the more impressive which has been only funded through community support and the occasional grant to do X and Y (this is why you see NVDA versions for long amounts of time concentrating on fixing one thing, Office, Adobe reader or most recently Kindle).

I do wonder if what Supernova is gaining now is dictated by their current user base. There would be 2 parts to this, the first involving things like the pod catchers and access to magazines and things of that sort for people that may not know how to use the internet as well, so mostly older people. But then isn't that what Dolphin Guide was designed for? I'm not sure if that's still receiving any updates or not.

The second part to the user base thing is how many users are blind, so use the screen reader, and how many are low vision and focus on the magnification? Making a magnifier is definitely easier to do and maybe Super Nova is perfectly adept at handling Modern Windows 10 apps if you look at it from that point of view. On that note, support for touch screens has existed in JAWS, Narrator and NVDA for a while now and last I heard about Super Nova in that aspect was touch gestures being supported... Only for the magnifier portion. And this was back in 2012 or 2013.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2017-02-15 20:14:11

Well I just had another conversation with dolphin, and again got the annoying man I met before.
unfortunately he was very much in the "well if you think it is better that's your view and I'm not listening because we support what we support", type of mould. Even when directly said "well when something that is free can do things that a paid product can't" he said "Well that's your view, other people find it better"

He did indeed raise the magnification point, however the point of supernova's magnification used! to be that a person with a degenerative sight condition could go from magnification to a a combination of magnification and speech, finally to just speech.

Even in magnification terms though, my brother, who used to use the magnifier switched a few years ago to free windows magnifier because he it could cover what he needed without the cost.

It's actually this attitude which disappoints me. Had he said "yes we know we have problems but we're going to try and fix them" that would have been reasonable, but to literally all criticisms as "your opinion", 

He even said he hadn't heard of anyone who used Nvda as a main screen reader (what he was smoking goodness knows)..

Even in terms of what older and none major computer users are looking for, I don't actually see any reason why someone like my mum couldn't! use nvda over supernova, indeed supernova has had something of a "go and find stuff" mentality, rather than just expecting to work automatically.

As for Nvda, I've always liked the philosophy behind the project, I just haven't really had the impetus to get off my bum and try it before now.

Definitely glad I have.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-16 04:02:46

Yes, I definitely recommend using NVDA as a primary. Jaws does the same basic things that NVDA does, accept that it has a few little fancy features here and there. Plus, it forces use of configuration profiles instead of just setting 1 thing to be used with all applications, so you have to go in and set stuff for each app you open. Window Eyes just has the basic features minus common keyboard shortcuts, such as capslock shift b to check your battery percentage and capslock tab to check what the object currently in focus is. System access I can't speak for because I haven't used it in a while, and I think it requires tampering to get it to work with versions above windows 7. Super Nova, I haven't used, but judging by your experiences with tech support I don't think I'll be choosing that. You definitely made the right choice.

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2017-02-16 17:50:37

Well Garret as I said, supernova used to be an exceptionally good screen reader I was happy with.
It used to be that supernova didn't concentrate on extra bells and whistles such as keys to read time and battery life (though it was easy enough to switch to dolphin curser, hit ctrl end and read such things on the taskbar), but just gave you good tools for exploring the screen.

One feature of Supernova I will admit I do miss in Nvda was setting levels of punctuation and things like numbers announced as either words or values spoken capitals dependingwhat you were doing even what sort of control you were looking at.

For example, I set supernova to read capitals and all punctuation when I was writing or when I used the basic read line hotkey, also to announce numbers in digits only so that I could accurately edit what I wrote.

In NVda, while I can control amount of symbols spoken generally and can toggle when I more or less spoken with the hotkey, don't seem to be able to setup what is spoken when directly.

I believe I can get some of the same functionality by setting up triggers and switching profiles, but it's not quite as or easy to setup as supernova.

The problem really with supernova is more one of actual support  giving the same access to modern windows as it used to in the classic days. Maybe it will catch up to this, I don't know, but it certainly won't if Dolphin just take any criticism as "well we don't support that so we don't have to worry about it" type of position.

I'm genuinely quite sad about this, since I've been using supernova for nearly 20 years since got my first windows 3.1 pc when I was thirteen, but so it goes.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-16 20:48:04

I am going to make a bold, bold prediction here. But at any rate, I think that as Narrator and NVDA continue to evolve, paid for screenreaders will eventually go the way of the dinosaur in terms of knowledgable users. The only support and purchases I think that they will receive will be government and workplaces that buy that particular screenreader, because they are stuck in the workings of yesteryear and that is all they know. Hell, maybe that is how things are now; I primarily float between Windows and Linux, and don't really keep tabs on such things.

2017-02-17 05:11:49

I've been a long-time Dolphin customer, too. Ever since the days of their old external speech synthesisers (Mimmic, Apollo, etc) and Hal for DOS. Great years, great company. A shame they've come to this. Even Supernova for Windows was technically brilliant, featuring things other screen readers didn't have, like pattern and shape recognition for types of controls. And indeed, like Window-Eyes, it was a much more do-it-yourself type of affair. But the fact that it had a fairly high learning curve also made it an ideal choice for more committed and advanced users as well. I always thought it was inevitable on some level that they'd have to relax their philosophy a bit to accommodate more newbie users; I just didn't expect it to be in the form of complete replacements for things that it should just work with (text editor and reader, podcatcher, etc).

But I didn't know they had a screen reader for Windows 3.x. That's a new one on me. I came back to them in the days of Windows 95.

Just myself, as usual.

2017-02-17 09:12:54

Wow Sebby, I remember the Apollo, great clunking box that it was, though it did give surprisingly quick reaction speed being a hardware synth.
I did have one occasion in a history lesson where apparently the Apollo box had fused and it proceeded to melt.
The first thing I knew was the speech becoming choppy, the second was the smell of melted plastic, after that point I pulled the plug out of the wall and ran for it big_smile.

It actually does surprise me supernova went down this route with adding podcatchers etc.
Always in the past, most of the actual updates were internal, about what types of controls supernova would support meaning that if you threw supernova at most programs it would be okay.
that is the bit I am rather sad about.

It's not adding a podcatcher or nls bard book player is a bad thing, its just that when I see the nuts and bolts of what supernova does not working the way they used to I have to question priorities.

I don't know what will happen in terms of commercial screen readers. I will keep an eye on supernova, and if I run into things nvda has trouble with will give it a go, though whether I will bother getting the v17 upgrade in a couple of years is debatable.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-02-17 12:27:01

@Dark that's wonderful.

Dolphin made a PCMCIA card for the Apollo II family for use with notebooks of the time, called Gemini. It had a distressing habit of fraying at the seam between the card and the module bolted onto its exterior end, into which you plugged your headphone jack. In an exam, once, it frayed, causing an immensely loud crackling noise that nearly deafened me, made me jump nearly to the ceiling, drew the attention of the entire exam room, and brought over the examiner to ask if I was all right. I was badly shaken up, to be sure.

Fun times indeed big_smile

And agreed re the general direction of Supernova and indeed other readers. I mean, in the end, when you come right down to it, the technology is obsolete in a new world of accessibility APIs--there's just not much reason for upgrading any more. Sure if you need some specific support for a particular OS or application, but really, at this point it's just duty to upgrade for the sake of being on the right side of customer service. Screen-scraping is still necessary, I think, and it will probably always be necessary for some time to come just because the nature of the Windows platform's history means you will always run into some program that doesn't work, but that happens far, far less often now than it did in the past as more and more programs become modernised to use the newer toolkits and so on. I guess keep Supernova installed, just in case, but use NVDA for your everyday stuff. That should get you most of what you need. I mean it's not as if switching screen readers is too hard, once you've learned it, and you'll probably find that once you've picked your favourite software you'll come to learn NVDA over time and be aware of its limitations. In the end you'll be fine.

Just myself, as usual.