JAWS license not developer friendly
January 10, 2008
For years, we have recommended to developers that they download the trial version of JAWS to perform basic evaluation of the accessibility of their web sites. Our recent, and quite popular, article on using JAWS to evaluate web content again makes this recommendation.
The demo version (which runs for 40 minutes per session) can be a valuable tool for web developers to not only ensure their content is accessible, but also compatible with this, the most popular of screen readers. The ability for every day web developers to test actual accessibility of their web content is not only important, but has greatly increased the accessibility of web content for blind users.
We were recently apprised that the licensing agreement for the trial version of JAWS states:
… these demonstration or evaluation licenses are not permitted for purposes of development and testing of JAWS scripts, applications, HTML coding, or other Web Based code.
In other words, you cannot use the demo version of JAWS for web evaluation. In fact, you can’t even use the demo version of JAWS to determine how well the full version could be used for accessibility evaluation.
Screen readers are very complicated pieces of software. As such, it is mostly understandable that they are so expensive ($895 for the standard version of JAWS). For many developers, the limitations of the demo would facilitate purchasing a license. And certainly the fact that the demo version of JAWS has been used for accessibility evaluation (obviously despite the licensing terms) has resulted in a great number of JAWS purchases.
But for other developers, particularly those that would perform only basic or occasional JAWS testing, the cost is not justifiable. The licensing terms for JAWS hurt these developers’ ability to create accessible web content for blind users. Such limitations are not apparent in demo versions of other screen readers, including Window Eyes.
With technology advancing, the ability for developers to use screen readers to evaluate web content is increasing. Indeed, with some web technologies, such as Flash, AJAX, and PDF, screen reader testing is about the ONLY mechanism available for true evaluation.
If Freedom Scientific has an interest in ensuring that their audience - screen reader users with disabilities - continue to be provided with accessible materials from the developer community, it would be incumbent upon them to modify their licensing terms to allow basic evaluation by developers or to provide a more reasonably priced license for developers who would use JAWS only rarely for accessibility testing.
If you would like to see a license change or version that allows testing, I invite you to contact Freedom Scientific.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:36 am
[…] Smith has raised a good point over at WebAIM in his recent post - JAWS license not developer friendly. Basically the licensing agreement for the trial version of the software (one of the most popular […]
January 12th, 2008 at 4:06 am
I agree with most of what you have written but you are wrong when you say “you can’t even use the demo version of JAWS to determine how well the full version could be used for accessibility evaluation”.
The license terms specifically permit this, saying “Software licenses which require either system reboot after a certain period of time … are to be used for evaluation prior to purchase only”.
In any case, what is there to evaluate from a developer or tester’s standpoint? JAWS is the de facto standard for testing because of its market share. You’re either prepared to pay for it or you’re not.
We do a lot of testing and training with JAWS so it was easy to justify buying the Professional version, but I can see that most developers and testers would not make use of much of the product’s capabilities. I don’t see how Freedom Scientific could base a license on how frequently a developer uses the product, but maybe they should offer a cut-down version that only supports web browsing.
It would be interesting to hear what developers would be prepared to pay for such a product. Any takers at say $200?
January 18th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Well Freedom Scientific did have a product called Connect OutLoud which would mainly work for browsing. Check if it is still available. It was priced for around $200 and was sort of a limited version of JAWS.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I checked the EULA for Window-Eyes and then called them to confirm that you are allowed to use their demo in 30 minute mode for as long as you like for any purpose you like. Obviously, if you use it alot they would like you to purchase it but they in now way require it. That is one of the differences in phoilosopy between the two companies I have liked about GW Micro.
They also don’t have the extensive authorization system that can cause annoyance if you have no Internet access. The Internet command structure is very similar in the two applications and quite honestly, I would suggest web developers consider using Window-Eyes to test sites instead of Jaws. It saves any possible legal ramifications and gives the same result.
January 20th, 2008 at 5:17 am
The problem with testing in just one version of just one screen reader (either a cut-price JAWS or the Window-Eyes demo) is that features and bugs can vary considerably from version to version and product to product. On an corporate intranet, you can make some assumptions about what assistive technology people are likely to be given by the company. On the public web, you can make no such assumptions: the variety of screen readers, browsers, and configurations is innumerable.
Paying to use Connect OutLoud to simulate JAWS is the worst of all possible options, since its feature set (in terms of web browsing) is very different and a certainly a poorer approximation of the JAWS experience than using the Window-Eyes demo.
While JAWS is the most popular screen reader, the rare figures I’ve seen don’t suggest it dominates the screen reader market to the same extent as Internet Explorer dominates the browser market:
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-April/009416.html
http://www.TheCounter.com/stats/2008/January/browser.php
My vague impression from screen reader mailing lists is that JAWS users are more likely than others to be using an older version of their screen reader. So even if there are substantially more JAWS users than Window-Eyes users, there are probably a lot fewer JAWS 9.0 users than Window-Eyes 6.1 users.
I’m not sure how interested I’d be in spending my own cash on a single version of JAWS at a cut price. I would however definitely be tempted to spend the same money on an annual licence to use any JAWS demo limited to 30-minutes per session for web testing purposes.
P.S. It would be good if it were indicated what markup or markdown (if any) is allowed in these comments.
January 25th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Gee, and people were on my case six years ago for musing that Jaws should be available at reduced cost to developers. (I got yelled at by Kynn, MCMayTechnoDanceRemix, and others, including a Freedom Scientific VP who actually did yell.)
Who knew they had been intentionally blocking developers all along?
February 4th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I think screen reader-like functionality should be a high priority in open source tools like the web accessibility toolbar. AT vendors just don’t seem to recognize the utility of their tools for this task and market testing tools as an added revenue stream. I wonder if anyone has tried using System Access To go for this purpose?
February 6th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Wow. ‘Freedom Scientific’ is such an ironic name given this.
I agree with Allen. It’d be great if developers took just half the money they were going to spend on a ‘test version’ of JAWS and sent it off to one of the open source projects instead.
February 14th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Does anyone have any thoughts on the built-in screen reader in Windows Vista? Is it at all valid for testing purposes, or is it so different that one can’t generalize the experience to true screen readers such as Jaws and Windows-Eyes?
February 21st, 2008 at 12:16 am
I am a novice (read total newbie) web site creator… in fact this is my first public website. It’s a free website for ham radio operators.
I have a blind woman in our radio club and want to learn to create my website optimized so she can read it using JAWS.
No way am I going to pay 800-some-odd bucks for a license to JAWS just to make sure she can read my page!
It seems like the JAWS developers would go out of their way to help website creators like myself learn to optimize our pages so that JAWS users (their customers) could use JAWS to read them.
March 1st, 2008 at 10:28 am
so it looks like people who want to test websites should better evaluate if jaws would be a good purchase and test with their newly written website.
i’m not familiar enough with american law to tell if this particular bit of the jaws eula is enforcable at all. i know from the legislation that i am living in that there are clauses that are not.
i dont get these people. 40 minutes is enough of a nag actually.
.~.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:38 am
I’m still going to use the demo to be honest. Why pay when they can’t stop me?
March 13th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
There is a lot of comment on pricing for JAWS above. Here is another wildcard.
I would not willingly pay $1.00 for Windows-only software (including, ever, the purchase nor use of Vista), and have not seen a good MS-DOS emulator that could feed the DOS version of JAWS from the web. If I were to try to rely upon a Windows-only tool, it would not have access to the internet. The XP and prior that I do have, will never run out of a sandbox.
As for anything that requires an overall system reboot. That’s a total non-starter.
Festival/Festvox/FreeTTS “Speak text-to-speech” still requires a lot of ear tuning, perhaps as much as (for some people, more than) rsynth “say” and “nasay” (for unix NAS), but it has a built-in XML parser, so offers promise for the XHTML and XML web. I have not had time to evaluate “say” nor “eSpeak” nor “Flite” from the Astrisk open-source PBX, as yet. It may be import of the other mentioned items.
I also have not (yet) evaulated the text-to-speech capabilities of Apple Mac OS/X Leopard, however older Macs had excellent built-in voices. … Cepstral, iVox, … Reportedly, Leopard includes built-in Text-To-Speech engine, which allows the Mac to talk back to you any written text.
http://freetts.sourceforge.net/ and
http://asterisk-espeak.sourceforge.net/ and
http://asterisk-flite.sourceforge.net/ and
ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/comp.speech/synthesis/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/rsynth/
April 30th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Quite an interesting thread! Well, for us at Serotek it’s easy. Use http://www.satogo.com or feel free to download and use our screenreader installed. In certain situations, we will be happy to provide evaluation copies for true website evaluators if they need extended lengths of time to test. System Access provides Accessibility Anywhere. Isn’t it about time the rest did the same?
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:43 am
Well, JAWS is not a developer tool. It is supposed to be a screen reader. Developers will not use it to read the news in their preferred news site, but exclusively to test their applications, ensuring that they are compatible with… JAWS. There is nothing to do with accessibility here. It’s just a compatibility matter.
Having applications compatible with JAWS, can definitely help on making JAWS more used. Of course the opposite is also true, but no one is asking Freedom Scientific to pay us to be compatible. We just need fair licensing terms. After all, if a developer extensively uses JAWS for testing, s/he simply gets annoyed with the 40 minutes limit and just buy it, if s/he can.
Things go really hard for us Open Source developers, with commercial tricks like this.
June 17th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Thanks for the link, Mike, I’ll have to check out your screenreader.
As for JAWS, I used it once years ago to test my site, got fed up with the 40-minute-and-then-reboot cycle, and never touched the thing again. 40 minutes wasn’t enough to get familiar with even the basic functioning of the software, and there’s no way I was going to try to justify a $900 piece of testing software for 1-2% of my users. If “Freedom” Scientific wants to make it that much trouble to test compliance with their software that’s their business, but I really can’t be bothered.
I wonder how much it costs them to make their software work with websites that haven’t tested for JAWS compliance?
Too much stick, not enough carrot.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
If you design your website correctly, you really do not have to test it in JAWS. If you follow basic practices, make the site W3C compliant, you are set. I think the demo is enough.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Just to let you know: In European countries such as Germany blind persons have to pay €1600 till €2300 for the screen reader Jaws. This are about $2000 till $3000 and not “only $900″. . Updates are expensive as well. Because of this reason a lot of blind users cannot afford the updates for the newest Jaws versions. This means, they have to browse the net with IE6 because IE7 and FF are not working well with older Jaws versions. This is a huge problem. I am searching for collaboration with political accessibility workers to make the trading policy of Freedom Scientific publicly known by govermental agencies in Europe. Help is appreciated!
July 9th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
If you think this is bad, imagine how bad it is for the visually impaired people who actually NEED the full version of Jaws to use their computer and the Internet. I teach a typing class to visually impaired people using Jaws in a computer lab. Most of them are on very fixed incomes and so they can not afford their own copy to use at home. Something needs to change there.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Writing a legal clause in to prevent people from testing their work for compatibility with your own software is basically clueless. Which is pretty much par for the Freedom Scientific course.
Happily, there are other alternatives for accessibility testing. In addition to assorted developer toolbars, there are also a couple of free/open source screen readers. Windows users needing to test with a full-featured screen reader can try Non-Visual Desktop Access, or NVDA, which is available free from:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
The learning curve on NVDA is fairly steep, but worth it. It’s a full-featured screen reader, in that it can read not only web content but also other applications such as Word or Excel. It works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox (best with Firefox 3). It’s open source.
There’s also FireVox, an extension for Firefox which turns it into a self-voicing browser. That’s available here:
http://firevox.clcworld.net/
FireVox is rather easier to learn than NVDA, largely because it’s restricted to web based content. Also, it only works with Firefox. On the other hand, it’s free of charge, open source, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. I use this frequently for quick spot checks; it’s handy to set up a second Firefox profile in which to install FireVox, so that you needn’t have it nattering at you all the time if you don’t need it to.
It would naturally be better to test in JAWS as well. But any testing is better than no testing, and if my pages work well in NVDA and FireVox, chances are good they’ll work in JAWS as well. That being the case, I’ll use the programs which don’t throw up nasty legal barriers against developers.