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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Most accessible users use JAWS on windows. I focus on accessibility a lot for my job. In fact, we have an entire department dedicated to accessibility design, implementation, and testing.

The reason why accessible users use JAWS is that it works across the entire OS and all the programs you have installed; start menu, PowerPoint, web browser, control panel, Google, etc. etc. The problem with the native accessibility tools is that it fragments the accessibility experience; you have one tool for OS operations, another tool for browser work, another tool for this, etc.

So that being said - it is a waste of time to target the native APIs for accessibility. Your target is JAWS and that's it. In fact, I'd argue that JAWS is better at reading HTML than native apps, so Slack is doing the right thing by moving all their apps to the cross-platform one.

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I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard. What is their moat, what exactly does it offer that it's impossible to replicate using existing libraries and APIs?

What's the standard really depends on which slice of the world/market you're looking at. NVDA[0] is a very capable screenreader as well and does some things even better than JAWS. It's totally free and open source.

[0]: https://nvaccess.org/

That's great, but nobody uses it, so we don't target it.

For GOV.UK we came up with a screenreader breakdown of JAWS at 38.5%, VoiceOver at 21.2% and NVDA 12%. That’s not a lot, but it’s not nobody.

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-the-...

Thanks so much for sharing your results!

> I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard.

Of course, there's always software that costs absurd amounts of money for seemingly simple things; IDA comes to mind. I'm not excusing it, but that isn't to say that it doesn't exist.

It has a very small but dedicated user-base. You could clone it, but you don't have a market to sell to. You can't just make a lot more blind people to grow the market. (You could, but please don't)

> What is their moat

Their moat is that the addressable market is too small for investors to bother investing in.

There are 36 million blind people in the world and other tens of millions with severe impairments. It seems more like the market is too small due to lack of investment and development.

I work at an accessibility research centre in Toronto. When people consult Occupational Therapists for their a11y needs the government here will subsidize a percentage of the software (and hardware?) costs. As far as I know JAWS gets recommended, NVDA doesn't :/

> I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard.

my recollection from speaking to a blind acquaintance is that it is subsidized by some government agency for personal use, and businesses buying it for blind employees are just stuck with it as an ADA thing.

I bought Jaws 15 years ago before NVDA was out. Because of this it doesn't cost me $1000 to keep using it, it costs me $200 every two years to keep up to date. IT's the only software I know of that offers good 3270 emulator support using third party scripts someone wrote. While it may be possible to make NVDA behave similarly with python scripting it would take more then $200 worth of my time since I'm not a Python programmer. Since I rely on it for my job it's also comforting to know I can call up someone and get help or open a support ticket if something is broken. I have not had to do this recently, but I remember calling up when I switched from office 2003 to 2007 at work because the UI was so different I wasn't sure if I was having accessibility issues or not. Support was helpful and had me working in under 10 minutes.

By tools, what do you mean exactly? The only tool you require on the OS-level is a screen reader, and it talks to the native Windows APIs depending on what application you are using. If you are referring to the different accessibility API implementations like MSAA, UIA etc. that is not something that should at all impede a native app of any kind, so what exactly are you referring to here?

I am referring to the native screen readers and the extensions browsers provide. Accessible users don't give a shit about the APIs, they aren't programming screen readers for themselves...

The native screen reader built into windows doesn't work well with web pages, so you have to get your own tool (sorry, screen reader) specifically for reading webpages. The browsers all have some extensions for this. So yes, now you have two tools to use - the native screen reader and the browser. And they both are garbage (I've used both while my license for JAWS was pending).

JAWS is Windows-only, so your solution of just targeting JAWS is not a solution at all, since Slack runs on a lot more platforms.

Accessible users are primarily on windows because JAWS runs on windows. It is not a use case for us to test accessibility on anything other than JAWS on windows.

It’s worth pointing out here that that’s true for the desktop market, but as with sighted users a large portion of time for blind users is taken up with mobile or tablet computing and there iOS and VoiceOver is the dominant platform.

Tell that to the Linux guy with vision impairment complaining here in the comments about slack.

Making software accessible just on Windows is complete bullshit and should be downright illegal.

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