Hi.
Come on, guys! Why are we having another flame war between different screen reader users? Isn't it like children in the playground playing war and actually being all friends?
Or actually it might be just too obvious, that those, who have payed for something are somewhat bitter about free and sometimes even better alternatives and just need to feel better about their decision by bashing other choices.
I have been on Jaws between 2004-2011, when my pc died and so I switched to NVDA fulltime since 2012, because I decided just not to upgrade my already then old Jaws 5.1. So I use NVDA on a dayly basis for everything: surfing the web, reading documents and of course making my music. Yep, every screen reader behaves differently to the other one in different places, but most of the time - not always, but most of the times, there are ways to get around nasty traps and seemingly unusable stuff, unless it's really made so, that none of the screen readers copes at all.
Having read so many of similar discussions, it's even interesting just to understand, why they take place. I'm not talking about just describing problems and difficulties using different products and solutions, but about this underlying bitterness between users of different products. Of course I totally agree, that Jaws is waaay too overpriced and those, who chose or are forced to pay, are not in good hands, but does it really give them the right to disregard others like that? I really don't think so.
So yeah, for some Jaws, for others NVDA and everything else in between. Hell - even Narrator becomes more and more something of a screen reader, though obviously not a fully featured one. So shall we at least try to break out of this thinking pattern for once? Patterns are good, because they repeat and thus can become a source of security, but even as a persone being more than probably on the spectrum, I should agree, that some of these patterns can really be disfunctional and hindering by nature.