Brian Vogel britechguy@... wrote:

My point, which seems to have eluded you, is that I constantly see complaints about issues, but when I (or you, or anyone else) bring up the fact that you must report them if you want to have any hope of their being resolved there is generally nothing but the proverbial crickets in response.

This is likely because too many screen reader users have seen the, sorry but I can't duplicate this. Next! Message in response. In addition, there are some larger issues.
Much of the accessibility stack is integrated into the frameworks needed to build the applications; coders of the actual applications built within the framework itself rarely go out of their way to make their appications accessible. That their apps built with the framework are accessible is a happy coincidence. In other words the fact that Firefox and Thunderbird are largely accessible with screen readers is not necessarily due to someone at Mozilla going, hmm, lets open up NVDA/Jaws/whatever and see how this new feature works--although organizations like Mozilla <em>do</em> in fact have some a11y testers. I don't know how many programmers are actually screen reader users there, however. But anyway the accessibility support is there because the coding frameworks they use to construct the applications have basic accessibility built in to them. witness such browsers as Pale Moon, which have this infrastructure removed and which are almost completely unusable with screen readers.
Speaking in general about bug reporting. When you report an issue about an application not working with your screen reader, it is likely you're going to get a, wow, I didn't know about screen readers, response. Because the developers did not know their applications could be used at all by us. Then, you'll either get responses that fall into three categories:
1. Sorry, but I don't know anything about screen readers, so I don't know what to do to fix it. Thank you for your support.
2. Well, let's see if we can make it work. What do I need to do to make this thing work with your ... screen reader?
3. Crickets.
In category one, you're pretty much out of luck. In category two, unless you know about programming there's not much you can do either. And of course in ccategory three, again, out of luck.
This is a basic summary of why a lot of screen reader users don't report bugs. Yes, doing so may be helpful in a lot of cases, ut in most of them, it can be a futile exercise.