its been too long since i had used jaws, a few considerations:
Get a program called process lasso and please try to optimize your pc too, because switching sr's for the reason that your pc is slow really is just too unrelated of a thing, I bet at least 30% of these processes you don't need anyway. My impression with jaws before is that it did reserve a chunk of your total CPU availability to simulate a faster performance and that it did not crash, except that the very sad problem really was, or maybe still is,  that ram management was quite ugly, and so was intercepting the drivers every single time. That actually screws up many things, everything from screens suddenly not being showing any kind of information, and all kinds of weird stuff with the jaws cursor and many welcome crashes.
The settings you are talking about I think are part of the Speech and Sounds Schemes found in the settings center. Its nifty and all, but remember that the more sounds and stuff you have, probably the more ram jaws will use, and the more reading and fetching from disk that has to be done... in a situation like yours, where you say that you have a lot running, that might just lag unpleasantly, at least at start up or when jaws needs a sound for the first time, but that all depends on internal workings and things that its makers will never reveal.

I use JAWS as my main screen reader, and I keep NVDA around as a backup. The main thing that keeps me using JAWS, is the braille support. NVDA's braille support is good, but typing in braille in JAWS is just so smooth. NVDA feels kind of clunky.

It's "tutor and message voice", not "cuter and message voice".
Sorry, that actually made me laugh.

My main issue, and the one which has me not switching to NVDA as a more primary screenreader, is that in a lot of websites I use, I prefer the way Jaws lays things out. In the game I'm developing, for instance, Jaws and chrome go together beautifully, while if you use NVDA there is blank space everywhere, and I don't know why, and I don't know how to fix it.

Okay. I'll look into it.
Don't have a Focus display, but I would think controlling it from a BrailleNote shouldn't be *mch* different.

Have you tried while using the BrailleExtender NVDA add-on?

https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/ … er.en.html

I use JAWS as my primary screenreader because its nice, fast, snappy, logical and efficient.

I agree with op re: message voice. It's one of the features I miss ever since I switched to NVDA a few years ago. It makes it so easy to tell what's on screen and what is extra screen-reader feedback. It helps in programs like Excel. With NVDA you'll hear something like "test a1," whereas in JAWS you'll hear "test [messageVoice:a1]".

Other than that, NVDA is great, far better than it used to be. I've tried playing with JAWS recently and found that it will randomly stop speaking things (how annoying is it to have Notepad++ suddenly stop reading?) And in my line of work I don't have time for these types of annoyances.

The changes to the way NVDA handles speech in 2019.3 should allow for these kinds of changes in the near future. I refuse to use JAWS as a manner of principle and because I despise Vispero and their business practices. Purchasing and merging with all their commercial competition in the United States is not cool at all! They have a lovely monopoly going because of it. I'd much rather use NVDA and support the life-changing work going on rather than dealing with activation issues and supporting a company that cares more about their bottom line than the users they claim to want to help. Where's the JAWS annual program for people outside of the United States? Where's a more affordable JAWS annual plan for some of the business features like Remote Desktop and Tandem Direct support?

Jayde, the blank line thing might be a JAWS setting. As I understand it, JAWS has an option to eliminate blank lines from web content.

Oh and NVDA works fine when reeading code.

Some responses:

@10,
Yes I have the add on installed, but braille input still seems clunky. It could just be me experiencing that.

@14,
I have started noticing JAWS stop speaking as well. I don't think JAWS is quite as reliable as it used to be.

To be honest, if I couldn't pick up JAWS for $90 a year, I would use NVDA.

@21, you're correct: JAWS hardly ever crashes. But what me and @20 are referring to is that JAWS will stop reading certain windows. For example, I see this problem in Notepad++ a lot.

JAWS will read the editor fine in one instant, then suddenly when you switch back to Notepad++ the arrow keys do nothing.

You have to restart JAWS to get it to read the window again.

So it's not necessarily that it's crashing--it hardly ever does--but that it's functionality is neither consistent nor reliable.

@23 that should seriously be adopted by all screen readers. The actual Braille symbols exist, so why not use them?
And also, true point. Had I not been given JAWS for free from my Vocational Rehabilitation center (good computer notwithstanding), I would have deffinitely gone with NVDA had that been my only option.
I agree with your sentiment about it sort of being down to preference, Jaidon.
A little off topic, but I did not like using the PC when I was in elementary school. On those computers, they had Window Eyes, and it never seemed to work well at all. I just  didn't like it. I would like to know if my child perceptions were getting in the way of it being a good screenreader, or if it was actually bad.