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.
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.)