[nfbcs] Is there a PRO / CON list for screen readers

[Rasmussen, Lloyd]

A Windows screen reader like JAWS, Window-Eyes or NVDA must work with accessibility information provided to it by the running applications (by means of MSAA, WPF, UIA, etc.) or hook into the function calls which place characters and graphics on the screen and build a database (an off-screen model or OSM) and keep track of that.  It cannot read bitmaps from an X11 screen unless it can do OCR in a reasonable amount of time and make sense of the results.

You can run Cygwin on a Windows system to sort-of emulate a Posix operating system, and JAWS and Window-Eyes, at least, can work with the character-mode aspects of Cygwin.

You can use Telnet or SSH to communicate with another machine from a PC or a Mac running VoiceOver for character-mode communication.  John Heim may talk about that in a subsequent message.

We have Speakup, YASR and a couple of other programs for character-mode access in Linux.  There is Orca for the Gnome desktop.  There is a whole accessibility framework on some of these systems, but I'm not sure that it has made inroads into traditional X11 systems.  People have worked on some access to X11 since the 1990s, even where you work, but I don't think this resulted in ready-to-run packages.  The Mercator Project was an early part of this.

Then there is EmacsSpeak, by TV Raman and others, an audio desktop which works on many Linux systems, and can be made to work in OS/X.  I'm going to forward the latest "press release" from Dr. Raman, because it is entertaining and also contains useful links to the project, which many blind people use as a productivity tool.

Hope this helps.  I don't use all of this stuff, but I monitor a lot of mailing lists to maintain awareness of what people are using and some of their trials and tribulations.  

Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Project Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress   202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.


-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Graham Mehl
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 4:41 AM
To: nfbcs at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nfbcs] Is there a PRO / CON list for screen readers

Hi All,

I was trying to resolve a screen reader issue I am having at work and got into a discussion with a colleague about screen readers.  I quickly realized I did not know all the various screen readers out there now. Does anyone know of a place I can get a list of screen readers that are available now?
And even better yet a Pros and Cons list for each. One of the issues I am trying to resolve is how to communicate between two OS platforms (Windows to Linux [Redhat or CentOS]).  And the second major issue is communicating between two [remote] desktops. The only screen reader I am currently aware of that handles  these issues to any degree is JAWS from Freedom Scientific.


 

I know there are a couple different applications that may assist with the communications aspect. I am trying to determine if the limitations are on the applications or the screen readers themselves. Either due to a lack of knowledge or ability to communicate I could not explain to my colleague why
X11 forwarding would not work with screen readers.  I believe the applications that can handle the X11 forwarding, like VNC viewer, are not accessible.

 

Thank you in advance for any information and insights.

 

--

Graham

blind at trailstone.com