What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy".
I thought it would be interesting, from an HCI perspective, to use a screen reader with something like a phone in your pocket, but sadly the learning curve is just too high, and there's not much motivation to improve it, either from the perspective of app/site developers (blind users are a rounding error) or even of the tool makers (blind users are highly motivated to learn their product, and will purchase it regardless of learning curve).
SEO, ironically, is the greatest thing to ever happen to blind users. All those people with tremendous financial incentive to make their sites spiderable to a text-only bot.
Seconded. I've done a bit of accessibility testing work with JAWS and was often frustrated by how unnecessarily difficult it was to use the software with a screen reader. You have to remember that it is probably uneconomical to make most software accessible and companies only do it because it is a requirement that software be accessible if you want to sell to certain governments (eg the USA). What this means is that development and testing is focussed on doing the bare minimum needed to pass a checklist, after which there isn't any need to do anything, regardless of whether the software is "easy" or merely "possible" to use.