It’s that time again.
Do I spend €445 on a Jaws upgrade and another SMA or do I move to a rival screen reader. Really, Window Eyes is the only application that comes close to competing with Jaws in my experience so it is the only one I am considering. Hal by Dolphin is just so far behind that I haven’t given it a second thought. This is just my opinion though. If your going through a similar decision then I encourage you to keep all of your options open.

I’ve downloaded a demo of Window eyes and I’m currently running it through it’s paces. I’ll have to blog about this in more detail but right away, I miss some of the more advanced features of Jaws that don’t just make applications accessible, they make applications more intuitive and more efficient. When I talk about access, I don’t just need the basic screen reading functionality, I need an application to assist me in accessing data as quickly as possible.

I like some features of Window eyes though. For example, the open scripting framework allows for standard development languages to be used. This is a major selling point.

I’ll write about this in a little more detail over the next few days I hope.