I'm starting day three without #JAWS on my new job. While JAWS is sitting there worrying about its missing authorization code and telling me I have to restart and work in 40-minute mode, #NVDA is humming along giving me exactly what I need to keep working! So now we ask which is the truly professional screen reader? #accessibility #Vispero

@darrell73 I think this goes a bit deeper than which screen reader is more professional. I love NVDA, and have a deep, deep dislike of JAWS. That said, I have to restart NVDA sometimes 20+ times a day. It suffers from stutters, freezes, hangs and sometimes crashes. If an app goes unresponsive, it takes NVDA out. If you're llucky, you can recover with Narrator, or sometimes even just CTRL+ALT+N to restart NVDA. But I've had times where it seems like the entire accessibility stack got taken out.

Try to use Event Viewer with NVDA and see how far you get. Try it with Narrator even - I bet you get a bit farther. Then try it with JAWS. It actually functions. Look at the difference in Visual Studio. There are things Narraotr reads that JAWS doesn't, but the latter tends to be more consistent and pick up more than NVDA does.

We could argue about equal access and being able to use what you pay for, but I think that'd be missing the point. Personally, I'd like to see a bit more from Vispero than restart your computer, but what would a perfect solution be when your license expires? They could take the position that you're not paying for the thing you're attempting to use at that point, so why should you get to use it? I'd like to see a middle ground between that stance and 40 minute mode. At some point though, you have to accept the fact that they're not going to allow you to use a product you're not licensed to use.

@bscross32 That's funny as I say the same thing about JAWS being too laggy, etc.
@darrell73 Oh JAWS is definitely laggy on my system, which is an AMD, where NVDA generally is not, or at least, when it is, it's predictably lagging due to something it's just not good at. Even turning input help mode on and hitting a key takes llike a quarter of a second to speak the key and what it does. I showed this to a very pro JAWS person I know and even they admit it's not normal. But this is across OS installs, it's just the way JAWS runs on this machine.