Wow, thanks for all the responses! I honestly had no idea if this kind
of topic would get any traction, or if it would completely just get
derailed into drama. Thankfully this is not the case at all. :)
Below are just some of my observations with using Jaws recently, so
feel free to chime in with your own tips, opinions etc.
I was really impressed with picture smart myself, considering that was
probably the first big thing I played with when using Jaws earlier
this year.
I think in some cases, the Jaws and NVDA commands are fairly similar,
so there wasn't a huge learning curve for me personally. The biggest
thing would probably have to be the Jaws/touch curser's, compared to
object nav. IF you can use the touch curser, then you're honestly 90
percent of the way to using object nav.
To the people making comments about addons being broken with each
major NVDA release, I do feel you. In a lot of cases you can simply
just update the manifest file for each addon to reflect the current
version and it *should* work, but I'd wager there's a lot of people
who may not know about this. Developers don't want to have to update
their addons with every major release either, especially if it becomes
more of a fix than simply updating their manifest file.
While I liked Jaws OCR, I did find it to be a bit buggy in certain
situations. I'd randomly have it get stuck in certain windows, then
when I'd go to OCR again I'd be informed that an OCR scan was already
in progress. Any time I'd try to OCR after that, I'd just be told that
the OCR component was not installed on my system. I could rectify this
by simply restarting Jaws, but it did get rather annoying. If I can
consistently reproduce this bug, I'll gladly report it. Unless anyone
has any tips on this one?
I've yet more testing to do on the touch curser, though from my
limited experience it wasn't quite as good as object nav. I'm not sure
if that's what it was trying to emulate though? Or if it was more of a
way to interact with newer style apps that can't interface with the
older mirror display drivers. I.E, the thing that makes the Jaws
curser function.
I do also wish that Jaws was better at handling dynamically updating
content too. Spotify, for example. I can scroll through my library
with relative speed using NVDA, but consistently struggled to have
Jaws catch up. I also noticed Jaws seemed to just bounce all over the
place on things like huge Reddit threads. NVDA is definitely guilty of
this one too, though it's not nearly as bad. I don't know if that's
just down to the way each reader renders it's web content though.
I feel like Jaws definitely wins out on legacy support, though I don't
know how much of a fair comparison that is to make, considering ones
had nearly 30 years of development behind it. :P
Apologies if this is a bit of a mess, this has all been a bit
scattered throughout my head and I'm just addressing things as they
come up.
Again it's been really cool to hear your responses, so yeah looking
forward to more discussion!
Cheers,
James