I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS (the popular Windows screen reader software for blind people) recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.
For example, JAWS will happily take the last sentence of a paragraph, and the first sentence of the next paragraph, and run them into each other as one sentence, if there's no full stop at the end of the first paragraph. If you really want to make your Web pages more readable to blind users, forget longdesc or even alt, or even markup of any kind, just make sure you're using full punctuation! And that's just one example. Browsing the Web with JAWS is a horrifying experience not because of the poor state of the Web, which is admittedly very poor indeed from the point of view of semantic and accessible markup, but because of the terrifyingly poor state of the screen reader software
What might make my experiences with JAWS even more worrying is that I'm told JAWS is amongst the best of the available screen reader software. It certainly isn't worth its ridiculous $895 price tag (let alone the $1095 price tag for the "professional" version I got). There is a big market opportunity here for someone to make a usable and affordable native speech Web browser or screen reader. Accessibility advocates could do more for accessibility by writing test suites for screen readers to check their basic HTML support (like supporting the p element) than they ever will by trying to educate Web authors.
I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS (the popular Windows screen reader software for blind people) recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.
For example, JAWS will happily take the last sentence of a paragraph, and the first sentence of the next paragraph, and run them into each other as one sentence, if there's no full stop at the end of the first paragraph. If you really want to make your Web pages more readable to blind users, forget longdesc or even alt, or even markup of any kind, just make sure you're using full punctuation! And that's just one example. Browsing the Web with JAWS is a horrifying experience not because of the poor state of the Web, which is admittedly very poor indeed from the point of view of semantic and accessible markup, but because of the terrifyingly poor state of the screen reader software
What might make my experiences with JAWS even more worrying is that I'm told JAWS is amongst the best of the available screen reader software. It certainly isn't worth its ridiculous $895 price tag (let alone the $1095 price tag for the "professional" version I got). There is a big market opportunity here for someone to make a usable and affordable native speech Web browser or screen reader. Accessibility advocates could do more for accessibility by writing test suites for screen readers to check their basic HTML support (like supporting the p element) than they ever will by trying to educate Web authors.
Text Source: Fire, a two-hour weekend, accessibility, and other rants
Note: The full stop has been removed from the second and fourth paragraphs for testing purposes.