I'm building a web browser [1] that tries to make the semantics of the web automateable, so its goals are kind of aligned with blind people in regards to semantics and extraction.
My knowledge of how blind people use the web is kind of outdated, though. Is JAWS still a thing?
(My web browser is far from being stable, lots of things don't work yet and there's a ton of work left)
Edit: To answer your other question, yes, JAWS is still maintained and widely used, but it's not as dominant as it once was. On Windows, the NVDA open-source screen reader is quite popular, and the built-in Narrator screen reader is on the rise (though of course I'm biased, since I worked on it). iOS with its built-in VoiceOver screen reader is also quite popular among blind people, at least in the US.
I was asking because back around 2008 when I was more involved with Accessibility on the Web, we built a website that had a legal requirement to be as accessible as possible. So therefore we were trying to generate accessible double-paged PDFs, voicing over DAISY books and all. And doing so was so much work. We spent thousands of man hours just on document conversion, even when the underlying source format for the documents was RTF which is at least theoretically easy to parse in regards to layouting.
Every time we tried to make things compatible with JAWS, we realized that JAWS was just a pile of dirty Trident hacks that wasn't integrated as nicely as someone would expect such a software to be.
It was before the rise of AI/CNNs so therefore converting a vectorized PDF back into a semantic one was totally impossible. These days tesseract seems to make huge progress, but is still unusable for the task in practice due to its high failure rate in recognized words that you cannot fix with tricks like a Levenshtein distances or dictionary statistics.
Eversince I've been more on the Linux side of things, though. Here the ecosystem is so bad that I cannot even start to describe it. Most TTS engines are literally from the last millenia, and projects like Orca aren't made for anything serious when trying to embed it into your software to give users more access and control.
Maybe you have also some hints here? Are there better alternatives that I'm not aware of?
I know what you mean. Those hacks were the state of the art for all Windows screen readers from the late 90s through the mid to late 2000s; I did similar hacks myself. But now that Internet Explorer is finally dead (I think), we can leave all that in the past. These days, web browsers implement documented accessibility APIs (there are still a couple of competing APIs on Windows), and screen readers consume them. Of course, between the web application, the browser, and the screen reader, there's still room for misinterpretation of the standards, but the situation is better than it was back then.
As for Linux, I dislike the Orca screen reader simply as a user. I hope to do something about that before too long (after my non-compete with Microsoft expires). I haven't yet studied the Orca codebase deeply though.
Blind people have strong feelings about speech synthesizers. One of the most beloved speech synthesizers among blind power users was developed mostly in the mid to late 90s and last updated in 2002; unfortunately, it's closed source. I'm actually pretty comfortable with eSpeak, or more precisely the espeak-ng fork, and I know I'm not the only one. Many of us value consistent pronunciation and intelligibility at high speeds over how human-sounding the voice is.
Document conversion is something that my new company is working on. I might do a Show HN on that sometime.
[1] The actively developed version of Mozilla TTS, named coqui-TTS. My understanding is that the original team was let go from Mozilla and they formed coqui.
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
They are also on Element Matrix:
https://matrix.to/#/#coqui-ai_TTS:gitter.im
[2] FOSS automated accessibility testing engine for websites and other HTML-based user interfaces:
https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core
[3] Emacspeak, developed by someone who was blind since childhood:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak
[4] UK government websites are famous for being accessible. They have design guidelines:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
[5] Similar system for the US govt.
https://designsystem.digital.gov/
[6] Mozilla MDN learn accessibility: