I used Window Eyes for 9 years, I still miss the way you could move around the mouse area.

Shawn Klein

I was a user of Window-eyes for several years before they sentenced that screen reader to death. Window-eyes is one the only screen reader is far I know of ever made a deal with Microsoft so this way it’s user can use Office for free. Heck, that was the screen reader my school taught me to use when I was in seventh grade because they have the latest version of Office. Right now I’m a heavy user of Jaws in Windows, and I just recently getting in to Voice Over on the Mac. I do use NVDA but I’m not a full time user of it.  It is good for an operating system to be open sourced so this way the end user with vision problem can have multiple choice to what screen reader they choose to install on their machine.

Best regards

Michael H> Munn

From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Shawn via groups.io
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2022 9:57 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] Article on Screen Reader History (including NVDA)

 

Yeah, I couldn't get that because you have to have a Brazilian bank account in a certain bank to get it. I thought it would be cool to try it. I did have DosVox though for a while and played around with it some years ago. There were some cool games, I especially liked the one where you have to try to land on the moon. But I had to use a different voice, the native voice was incomprehensible to me as it was just made up of a bunch of syllables in wav files. Sounded like an alien robot. For native speakers it wasn't a problem, but for me I hated it. Luckily you could use a Sapi voice with it. It was basically a screen reader for people who didn't want to have to learn windows. It had loads of parts like a word processor, dictionaries, a telnet type client, and a file manager and I forget what else. Lots of people say it makes its users lazy for that reason, and they don't bother learning how to do things with windows and other programs.

Shawn Klein

On 7/18/2022 6:35 PM, Rui Fontes wrote:

And everybody have forgoten a screen reader developed in Brasil, named Virtual Vision...

 

Rui Fontes

 

Às 00:28 de 19/07/2022, Gene escreveu:

the article is interesting and it has good information about JAWS and NVDA.  But it has problems.  It should have said something about Window-eyes because a lot of people used it and it was a good screen-reader.  It helped in development of screen-reader innovations in ways that should have been noted.

But a serious problem in the article is that it gives the reader the impression that there shouldn't need to be independently developed screen-readers if developers of software built accessibility into them.  This is erroneous for two reasons.

First, yes, accessibility should be built into programs and operating systems but we have been better served by screen-readers being developed outside of operating system programmers.  We are much better off having choices when it  comes  to Windows screen-readers.  It is a constantly stated truism that some screen-readers work better with some programs than others.  If Microsoft had developed a good screen-reader from the outset, we would probably only have one screen-reader and even if we would benefit from having more, we wouldn't. 

The article doesn't discuss this at all and the author is evidently completely unaware of the arguments about which is better, one screen-reader developed by the developers of an operating system or what exists regarding Windows.

I think we are much better off as things are. 

Gene

On 7/14/2022 10:06 PM, Laurie Mehta via groups.io wrote:

Hi,

I came across this today and am sharing it here because I think that many here will find it interesting. (Link below my name…)

-Laurie

 

The hidden history of screen readers

 

 

https://www.theverge.com/23203911/screen-readers-history-blind-henter-curran-teh-nvda