I remember when reading the what's new was actually exciting because there was usually something genuinely useful and interesting in there. Jaws never comes with anything new worth shouting about these days. The tab key is no longer echoed, wow, break out the champagne.

Yeah, I'm not impressed by the change log. I'll keep using NVDA and Narrator. This is just another excuse for FS to milk more money out of agencies.

Have to unfortunately agree with the majority here. The sad thing is that FS will have even more excuses to get money with Windows 10 constantly updating. Audio ducking now works again? Wow, that's a feature and not a bugfix? NVDA fixed this as soon as the creators update came out, but well.

The podcast is quite good, for falling asleep I mean.

I feel the same way. It's been rushed. They had a specific date and needed to do something for it.

Well, Cortana no longer ducks JAWS when it's being talked to or responding, so that's a plus. I'm guessing that had something to do with the audio ducking fix, because Cortana does duck other audio but never ducked narrator.

haha you know, and I am sorry to put it as an example, (you could skip down some lines if you wanted another example though) if we check NVDA, which does have specific periodic release deadlines in place, just like any other serious software company in the world, we have:
1. 10 new features
Some of them are reporting things, others are supporting NEW braille displays, or at least new controls for them, others are enhancements to things already in place, (automatic detection of braille displays), others support NEW things that windows 10 has to offer like dictation, emoji panel (who would not want to use that nowadays that we are being more and more social) and so on.
2. 9 changes. Those have to do with doing actually something productive like updating liblouis, adding braille tables, facilitating the selection of languages.
3. An impressive ammount of bug fixes, 20!
they even talk about the windows October update... and oh look, its 18 september 2018.
Tons of stuff, and this has happened in roughly 4 months!

and they rightly call this version 2018.3, NOT NVDA 2019 public beta. What a shame. I hope fs slaves are actually reading these forums. Or maybe not.. maybe its good they will keep ignoring happily retired customers like myself since they business model gives them so much sustainability and importance around the world with so so so so many charitable deeds they have of course NOT done.

Right, if you wanted a different comparison because you are terribly sick of the screen reader that is known for sounding like a frog on steroids when it first came out (right, eSpeak also had been updated in this latest one)
then lets look at cockos reaper, whose owner was the author of the winamp software we all loved and some of us continue to love, it miraculously, amazingly and rightly works like a snap in windows 10 and was discontinued almost 13 years back, would you believe it? But this is about their audio workstation, reaper:
Reaper this year has had about 15 updates. 15! from january of this year. And, unless something really critical or annoying does not let minorities like us blind folks work, they actually go and fix it anyway

and change logs usually do have over 15 or 20 items for each 0.01 version number.  SO, actually I feel that its pretty much the best 60 dollars i have spent. This company really makes me feel valued as a customer. They also call their latest release reaper 5.95 and not reaper 6 public beta. Hmm, I do really wonder why...

Agreed with the last post.

NVDA does have betas, but that really is no excuse.

Hmm. I thought NVDA had a wrapping feature somewhere. I'll have to take a look at the user guide.

JAWS 18 and especially 2018 actually had me a little excited because they brought some kind of useful features. In particular the speech on demand mode sticks out, being able to do reading commands while your speech is muted is surprisingly useful if you're doing something like watching a video or doing something in a terminal that generates a lot of speech. It also had far fewer issues with UIA than NVDA, though it looks like with the latest Windows 10 and NVDA releases NVAccess is finally starting to get a grip on it. Though like Afrim said JAWS is still a faster on heavier websites, especially on lower end hardware like the Atom Z8750 powered GPD Win.

All that being said I can't do much else apart from agreeing with previous posters. JAWS 2019 feels a little bit like a cash grab. Some of the stuff they announced, like fixing audio ducking, really should be a 2018 bug fix. Why should people have to pay for the fact that FS implemented the feature in a way that made it not work after a Windows update when every other screen reader was not affected?

I'll be curious to see how this new license portal turns out, though as usual it's going to be US only at launch which gives America the 50001st way to get JAWS cheaper, while the rest of the world who'd need such things more are stuk with nothing.

Hey, at least they just released a tool to make their fancy OCR cameras conform to standards so you can use them in more up to date scanning software. But as far as JAWS goes, if 18 and 2018 made me give them some credit, where they even went as far as to back port the Edge support to JAWS 18, this new update, and their recent blog post where they turned the Firefox ESR update into an advertisement for why you should buy an SMA or else you're gonna be screwed, is making me less optimistic for where they're going.

also, note that there is a command to add to the nvda config file to enable it. Though apparently it has some limitations with reading revisions and comments.