English : Practical Screen reader comparison

Practical Screen reader comparison

This report details a study carried out in the summer of 2010 at the Iceland National Institute for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Deafblind. The aim was to come up with a framework that allowed us to compare Screen Reading solutions across different applications and on different operating systems. Based on this framework we compared five major screen readers: Jaws, Hal and NVDA for Windows, Voiceover for Mac OS 10.6 and Orca for Linux. The comparison was carried out with the latest versions of the Screen Readers available at the time and shows that the traditional screen readers (Hal and Jaws) still hold the edge when it comes to braille support and working with Office applications, but the Open Source and Apple screen readers do a very good job for users more interested in web browsing, emails, online chat, Skype and other activities that do not require advanced screen reader Office functionality or extensive braille support.