Hacker News Reader

Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

How does JAWS compare with Orca, a common screen reader for Linux desktop systems?

Does it even show in your radar, compared to JAWS?

I need to fix a site to work with Orca and it would be nice if that also made it be friendly to JAWS users, but I know next to nothing about either.

View on HN

Orca is hardly ever used, however, if that's what you have available, trying it is still miles ahead over not doing anything. There's a lot of things you could do to make an OK experience better, but the highest bang for the buck is making a broken experience at least work - and any screen reader will be able to help you discover that some part of your app is completely unreachable using the keyboard when navigating using the screen reader.

In theory, if you make a website work with one screen reader, it should work with all of them. Of course, in practice, just as with browsers, there are corner cases where screen readers differ in their support or interpretation of the standards.

My guess is that if you make the site work with either Orca or NVDA (an open-source Windows screen reader), it will work with the other, and with JAWS. So if I were you I wouldn't bother to set up JAWS and test with it.

This is the case for some accessibility issues, but at the edge cases the differences between screen readers is significantly more apparent than with browsers and it's also significantly easier to hit edge cases with screenreaders. This is almost entirely due to screen readers each having their own idiosycratic solutions to what they do when they encounter a section of a website that sends them into 'interaction mode'. WAI-ARIA was designed to help in this regard, but the actual implementations don't seem to be help to the same strict standards that browsers are. This is the case for pretty much any complex frontend widget and can really only be solved using a specific screenreader to determine exactly what it's going to do once it encounters and needs to interact with your complex UI.

The GPL'ed 'Emacspeak' developed by T V Raman, who is blind. Actively developed since 1995. Seems quite advanced? Idk anything about it, seems to need Emacs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak

Github: https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak

I asked an accessibility expert in Australia this question and he said orca rated very lowly. Better than browser extensions, but nowhere near as good / frequently used as Jaws/NVDA.

I wish I could say. I haven't spent much time looking into other options.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com