Heliographwhile I'm at the topic of #screenreaders - just found out NVDA is a project by 'NV Access' - an Australian non-profit that develops NVDA as a free, open source screen reader for WIN https://www.nvaccess.org/download
#screenreader #thanksguys
NV Access@Heliograph It sure is! And we're here on Mastodon to help with all your NVDA related questions, comments, feedback and, well, anything else :)
@NVAccess hello there 👋☺️ thanks, can I ask then: do you do website audits as well? And/or could you give general commendations?
@NVAccess (I could DM you the site in question and you can say yes or no 😅)
@Heliograph Good question. We don't do website audits - primarily because web accessibility is complex enough that there are entire companies dedicated to purely that. We do have a good relationship with @intopia and would recommend them. There are other companies who also do similar work.
@NVAccess thank you my company has hired them and we now work through their recommendations but it appears very hard to test because the three screen reader used all behave differently in their output
@Heliograph You're working with Intopia? Fantastic! Different screen readers shouldn't behave too differently from each other for the most part. Intopia should definitely be able to recommend why one is giving different information. In some cases the default settings may be different. EG NVDA does not report changes in text colour by default, but it CAN. Or one may read the same information but in a different order. That's ok & may be a reason why a user may pick one screen reader over another.
@Heliograph Happy to try to answer any questions! Do you mean how screen readers behave to each other? Or how they make the computer behave compared to not having one running?
For how they work at all, we have a quick video demo of NVDA here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCFyyqy9mqo
There are settings you can change which alter (or restore) behaviour - happy to go through any of those you might be interested in.
For differences between screen readers, here's a page on Jaws & NVDA: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/wiki/SwitchingFromJawsToNVDA
What is NVDA?
@Heliograph Aside from NVDA, You mentioned Narrator and I mentioned Jaws, Narrator comes with Windows and is less full featured. Jaws is a commercial program which costs around $2,000 (plus upgrade costs every couple of years). NVDA is completely free by philosophy. Feature-wise, NVDA and Jaws are quite similar
@NVAccess thanks for this, yes I meant what one SR reads out (nvda) while another does not read out that same line (narrator) ... am just puzzled about that behaviour, but have since established that nvda is 'superior' and or widely preferenced to narrator
(unsurpsingly, the latter being a MS product >.<)
(unsurpsingly, the latter being a MS product >.<)
Darrell Bowles@NVAccess JAWS does not cost 2000 dollars, unless you purchase a professional license. In the united states, users can get a home anual license for 104.00 per year. Currently JAWS sma's cost 228.00 per two years, but they will be going up at the end of october by 10 percent. I am not as well versed in pricing for JAWS outside the US, but there are other options for purchasing JAWS in the US.
@NVAccess Also, I use both JAWS NVDA and sometimes even narrator. All 3 have a place in the windows screenreader toolbox.
@vol4life8657 Sure - and I wasn't saying the others didn't, though yes, I put more of a case for NVDA (it is kind of my job) - re the price of Jaws - the account I was replying to is on an Australian server. In Australian dollars, Jaws Home is $2,280 according to Qantum: https://www.quantumrlv.com.au/products/jaws-home-edition-with-sma or Vision Australia: https://shop.visionaustralia.org/jaws-home-with-sma.html or Visability: https://livingaids.com.au/products/jaws-home
An SMA on its own from most of those looks to be about $310 AUD
@NVAccess Good grief, that's a lot! And again, thanks for clarifying.