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From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Mar 21, 2006 2:20PM

Here's my 2 cents worth--international clients will need to convert for
their own contexts.

JAWS screen reader may indeed have the widest range of features of the
major vendor offerings. My experience is that it is fairly easy to
install and maintain. it works with more web content than the other
products generally also.

Windows eyes does not work well with JAVA and this can be a real show
stopper for some applications.

SuperNova may not work well with Java yet either, and the installation
can be problematic to support a wide range of users on the same machine.

JAWS and Magic as a combo are still probably your best bet.

however, consider what you want people to do.

Read websites? how about IBM HomePage Reader? it does a nice job of
this.

How about Openbook or Kurzweil 1000, or 3000?

A combination of HomePage Reader and a scanning package would probably
give people more choices in the end.

the best approach is to define the kinds of things people will do and
then select the solution that does those things best. Screen reading is
done for a purpose, to do something, not just a homogenious action
across all things doable from a computer. This is why, for example, you
might select Kurzweil and/or OpenBook and Home Page Reader, as you get
good website reading, and excellent page OCR/reading as well. Don't
forget screen magnification, visual disabilities come in all sizes.