Forty minutes to test out a product, when you can trigger it indefinitely? That's actually pretty generous. As far as I'm aware, demo mode never ends. i.e., you can use it in forty-minute bursts basically forever. Not ideal though.

What is not generous, however, is the overall pricing model. I think most of us are in agreement that it needs to change. Badly. Like yesterday.

YOU HAVE To UNDERSTAND THAT I'M NOT SAYING JAWS IS BAD BUT IN A LOT OF CASES, MAINLY OUTSIDE OF THE WORK PLACE, NVDA DOES JUST AS GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And...what I'm trying to tell you is that some people would be willing to work through that. I was for awhile. I would interrupt MSN convos, play sessions on MUDs and such in order to restart my machine. It was a known thing. My friends poked at me for it sometimes, but they knew what was happening and it didn't really bug them too much. You get used to it, like anything.
However, as I said, there are lots of cases where it's not okay. If you're working, for instance, you shouldn't have to restart your computer every forty minutes. Also, if your computer has a deep-freeze-like setup, where it will reset everything when it restarts? That is an enormous headache.

Yep, Jaws has omni page by I believe Nuance, though could  be wrong on this. I have no idea how many languages it supports, but Windows 10 OCR is way more international, so good OCR is not a fact. Yes, you require Windows 10, which not everybody uses, but it's the future and eventually everybody will indeed use it. With each update of Jaws, it's just the feeling of this screen reader is forced to develop because of already mentioned agencies, but the code base is so old that they can't do major updates to it, and each time they have to use hacky workarounds to fix bugs.

Citation needed: Seriously.
How is this OCR better? What can it do that windows can't?
I'd totally test this stuff out, but I do not want to inflict jaws on my GPU drivers as it'll probably break everything and I really don't want to have to piss about getting everything reinstalled.
Windows in 16 color mode is really not cool.

I talked to VFO/freedom scientific sales yesterday and they now offer a Jaws license for the most current version for 90 dollars a year. That's about what microsoft office costs, I believe. Is it too late in the game for their motives to be anything other than making a profit however they can? Probably. Will I spend the money even though I really can't afford to and even though NVDA works about as well for most things and better for a few? Probably, unless I can get it payd for first. Here's why.
1. Maybe this is personal preference, but the jaws and especially invisible cursor seems much more powerful than NVDA's object review and most power users, even those I've talked to who've ditched Jaws, tend to agree. If I'm opening a random app I've never seen before, I'd much rather have the flexibility of being able to route jaws cursor to PC, route PC to jaws, use my invisible cursor if none of those are working, etc. Maybe I don't understand NVDA's object review as well as I should, although it's been my primary screen reader for years, but in a pinch when I have a screen that normal navigation can't handle Jaws often works better.
2. Jaws has more reliable Braille display support, and I'm fortunate enough to have access to a Braille display. NVDA frequently can't handle my Braille display and I have to do the disconnect/restart/maybe disable and reenable add-ons dance. It's worth it for me to have a stable program that won't make me do this every day, and perhaps more crucially has support that can help me fix bugs that do crop up. I've talked to NVDA contributors about my Braille Display issues and basically gotten a "We're sorry, best of luck because we can't replicate the issue," response. That's understandable given NVDA's open source model, but it's still annoying.
3. Most importantly, it makes lots of professional work legitimately faster. I worked at a call center for a while with NVDA and the way it reads complicated tables is ever so slightly slower than JAWS, the way it lays out web pages is just a tad more cumbersome, not so much that I noticed in personal use... but when I switched over to JAWS, just on a whim, I was all of a sudden making 1-2 more calls per hour consistently. Verbosity settings for web browsing are just slightly more customizable, the way JAWS reads web content seems just a tad more efficient in a way I can't quite articulate...but I can tell you, as someone who's mostly used NVDA for years and knows both screen readers fairly well, people pretty much universally noticed I did my job faster with JAWS. Is that always going to be true in every situation? Of course not. Is it enough for me to make damn sure I have Jaws around for times when that extra boost might be critical? Most likely yes.
In short, they both have their place and neither one's going anywhere. NVDA is robust, competitive, and able to do pretty much anything JAWS can do, sometimes better. I do, however, think it's very telling that pretty much all the schools, government agencies and companies I know of, at least in the states, still subsidize JAWS. At this point it's not just a matter of the good old boys club making sure all the right backs get scratched; people like saving money, and by now if NVDA really was capable of replacing JAWS JAWS would be gone. The two programs have been basically at parody for over five years, a lifetime in the software development world. If NVDA really made JAWS unnecessary don't you think VR and all the rest would've just stopped paying all those extra thousands of dollars to give their tight budgets some wiggle room? Companies especially are all about cutting costs as much as they can get away with and they're still mostly paying for JAWS.

I think that $90 a year thing is only for US customers, but I could be wrong, I would have to check.

If only they did that a few years back, it's certainly more afordable than the price they use to charge for a SMA renewal.

That's one of the reasons I made the switch to NVDA, plus I found myself using Jaws less often.

Is Eloquence still the default voice when you install the program?

I know there are other voices that came with the product, but I've never really gotten use to the human sounding voices.

I put up with them on the iPhone until Fred became available and never looked back.

One thing I wish screen readers would do is not have a separate keyboard layout for desktop and laptop.

System Access doesn't do it, and neither does Narrator.

It just means more shortcuts to learn.

Stick to one set of keystrokes and use them across the board.

I can use jaws in a pinch if I had to, I doubt it changed that much in 6 or 7 years.

Any new feature can easily be learned.

Hi.

One thin I do like about JAWS now that I've tried it out again is that JAWS says if the link is visited first. When you're on youtube this is quite useful.

@Cool_turk
Oh, that's not good it's only available in the U.S. This is why NVDA is a game changer for so many people and I'd never say it isn't.

@Defender
I've chabged a few of these settings, not all. Thing is, and I have no evidene for this other than "it just feels like it, ok?", but NVDA doesn't seem to handle changing web settings as consistently as well as JAWS. I've mucked about with online verbosity to make  it read more like JAWS and, well, it just doesn't seem to always stick all of the time, especially on big web sites. Maybe that's just me?

Hi.

I was just uninstalling jaws and wow! There's so much to uninstall!

They can't make it easy can they? You must uninstall this, then that, then that, then this thing. So much work when an uninstaller that uninstalls all fredom scientific stuff at once would be so much better.

i agree with mostly of defender's arguements.

thou i m a Jaws user since 2000. Though i use Nvda over Jaws these days. The most important things i don't like on Nvda are, You need to install addons for each functioning setup while Jaws doesn't give You all these headakes, all simillar functions comes built in with Jaws, install it  and You're good to go. If Nvda can get over this barier Freedomscientific will use many custommers.

How ever i believe we still need to keep as mutch differant screenreaders as we can since they have advantages or disadvantages over one by the other.

To be fair, JAWS has trouble in larger documents too, just when using tools like text analyzer and skim read with custom rules, so bad it often crashes, which is a big shame considering how powerful those features can be.
But yes, navigation wise it does seem to do better with lag.  I really hope this gets better with NVDA 20.1 though...