My two cents: I use NVDA at work. My reasons are:
1. Superior scripting. I wrote half a dozen NVDA add-ons that greatly boost my productivity. For example, IndentNav, TextNav, BrowserNav. Writing similar scripts for Jaws would be hard since I'd have to learn new scripting language, and I was told (correct me if I'm wrong) some of my add-ons would be impossible to implement in Jaws scripting model since it is more limited in nature.
2. Better maintenance. Let's be honest, both NVDA and Jaws do have bugs. However I am delighted to observe that NVDA bugs do get fixed in a very timely fashion. An example of that would be recent breakage of Notepad++, that was fixed within only 10 days. To give you example from the other side, command prompt in Jaws had been broken for two years (approximately entire 2016 and 2017) and all my attempts to talk to Jaws customer support ended up with pretty generic messages "we're working hard on it, but it's not our fault anyways." This was actually the reason why I switched to NVDA - it is hard to keep your job knowing that an essential tool can get broken for years.

it wouldn't be allowed on secure environments due to being open source.

It is allowed at my work. Now I've indeed heard of cases when IT department wouldn't allow you to use NVDA with this excuse. It is important to understand the difference between real reasons and excuses. This one sounds to me like an excuse - there is nothing whatsoever in open-source software that makes it inherently insecure. However there are people in IT departments, who are lazy, and sometimes dumb - pardon my French. And in order to avoid doing a little bit of work, they might just reject NVDA with this excuse. On the positive side, it seems to me this happens rarely enough these days.
--Tony


On 8/25/2019 4:38 AM, kelby carlson wrote:

Hi, everyone,

I hope this isn't too off-topic. I recently heard an argument that NVDA is bad for blind prospect's in employment because it is the "dumbed down" solution. The person arguing this elaborated, saying that NVDA is not customizable/flexible enough (too chatty"), that it was not able to be scripted as easily, it didn't work well with as much proprietary software, and that it wouldn't be allowed on secure environments due to being open source.

So my question is this: how many people here use NVDA for work, and is there a notable dilerence in level of usability with JAWS?

Also, does NVDA have a skim reading feature like JAWS?