Jaws 2018? I doubt that'd work well. I'm an NVDA user but there is a lot of UI changes and that's going to effect an old screenreader version.

I have no issues with windows 11. for those who claim that it is like the vista days. windows 11 does run better on my machine better than windows 10 has ran on this system. jaws 2022 works great with windows 11. it is not worth downgrading to windows 10 anyway. I would just get used to using windows 11

Was a past Jaws user. The latest version works with 11, so no problems with that.

My personal experience here. Running Jaws 2020, for what that's worth.

Windows 11 is perfectly usable, and most things are fairly intuitive. There'll be a learning curve, but it's not a steep one.

Now, I personally downgraded to windows 10 just yesterday, and I'll tell you three reasons why.

1. When using alt-tab, Jaws was always saying something like "task switching, desktop" followed by gibberish. I have absolutely no idea what the hell that was, and I did try monkeying with it. It's a very small thing, but it grew to annoy me.
2. The start menu is different, and I don't want to have to monkey with third-party alternatives to make it behave more like Windows 10 when Windows 10 was working just fine for me on my old laptop. Specifically, typing into the search box in the start menu made my system lag for some reason, and it wouldn't always even bring up the things I wanted. The windows 10 start menu is perfectly good with me.
3. This one is more personal preference, but still. I use Internet Explorer for a few sites, although I know it's not safe. I generally use it for 3-4 sites in particular, and have Chrome running otherwise for everything else I'm doing. Windows 11 strips IE out entirely; you can't use it unless there's some sort of hackish workaround, and again, not gonna bother. It'll be gone in six months but for now I'm comfy with it. I am just not a fan of Microsoft Edge for whatever reason, and Windows 11 tries really, really hard to get you to use Edge.

None of these things were absolute dealbreakers on their own, and if I'd been told I couldn't revert to windows 10 for whatever reason, I'm sure I would have found a way to cope. But since I did have the option to downgrade, that's exactly what I did. The new laptop, by the way, is zippy, responsive, and has a battery like a champ, and I have it doing about 90% of what I had my other laptop doing (have yet to download some games and NVDA yet, for instance).

But yeah...if you're going to stick with Jaws 2018, you may want to revert to Windows 10 just on principle, since those two will work better together than will Jaws 2018 and Windows 11.

Well, it's more that Jaws 2020 is the most recent version of Jaws I legally have access to, and my new laptop shipped with Windows 11. So I installed Jaws and ran it for a few days to see if I could stick it. I could, and I did, but I disliked some of the quirks, so I just reverted.

I agree with 11. If you absolutely insist on using JFW, get the home annual license provided you're in the United States or Canada. It's much cheaper than maintaining an SMA or not maintaining it and being forced to pay for versions you'll never use. Either that or use NVDA. It's more important than ever to keep your screen reader up to date as Windows and other major software changes frequently.

I, as a current NVDA user, have to agree with posts 11, 12 and 13. I'm not in the US so my only screen reader that I use is NVDA, for ever.

I am happy I have upgraded. I have always used classic shell and I never have to worry about the start menu at least. I am also glad I have not had to face some seriously yucky issues others have had like some of the drivers crashing the system hard and so on. I have been using NVDA for about 10 years almost but of course not everyone will be either satisfied or have things working. You could just upgrade, test and then downgrade but honestly its really much much better to keep things always current if you can do so, for many very obvious reasons.

So I find it ironic that even though this is a thread about another user and whether or not they should use windows 11 or revert to 10, I had three people jump on the "you should use NVDA" or "you should buy the Jaws license" bandwagon. This is unsolicited advice I neither want nor need. To be clear, I use NVDA as a secondary screenreader, but do not like the way it behaves, especially on the internet. I greatly prefer Jaws for most tasks, though I also have great respect for NVDA. Really, the only reason I came back in here was to take note of the fact that, yet again, we have at least a gentle pushing toward NVDA where such was not necessary. Please cut it out, and please trust that if I were having any serious issues with my screenreader, I'd either switch or upgrade. I proved already that I'm perfectly capable of switching operating systems, so I think that should also demonstrate that I'm capable of switching or upgrading screenreaders if I wished.

Chris is mostly correct, though flaming FS and their business practises, whilst perfectly valid, probably isn't particularly constructive here. The Jaws subscription suggestion is a solid one, and you shouldn't have much of a problem budgeting for it. Also you'll probably be thankful later on, once new updates come in and you can update right away.

weird, I prefer the way how NVDA reads the web pages compaired to jaws. I have the issues with the form fields with Jaws to where I had to hack my way around the settings center to disable some stuff. lets not forget how much of a mess jaws is with the settings center,

The only thing I use IE for now is is an RSS reader. It'll be a sad day when I can't do that anymore.