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Re: Monitoring JAWS adoption trends for testing/support

for

From: Joseph O'Connor
Date: Feb 21, 2007 2:20PM

On Feb 21, 2007, at 11:00 AM, <EMAIL REMOVED>
wrote:

> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Date: February 20, 2007 3:04:29 PM PST
>
> I am a newbie to this forum and looking for input on JAWS support. My
> company has decided to test and support only 1 screen reader, and
> that is
> JAWS.

Costa,

At the risk of enduring a firestorm of opprobrium:-)

I highly recommend Fangs for Firefox.

Fangs (text based screen reader emulator)
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs

Fangs takes a page and outputs it as text in the form that screen
readers would read your page. JAWS output is ephemeral. When JAWS is
done reading a page, you aren't left with anything concrete, and
while you are reading the page you have to pay close attention to
listen for things that should be there and notice when things that
shouldn't be there are present.

This is NOT to say that Fangs is a replacement for JAWS. I use both.
One place that Fangs shines is that Fangs output is easily
understandable by just about anyone, and the output can be copied and
pasted into an email or saved and read at a later date.

I recently collaborated with a coder on a project to build a
calendaring system. I went to the calendar page, ran Fangs on it,
copied the text and emailed it to the coder. I got a call telling me
that "now she understood the problems" because it was there in text
in front of her. Not so easy with JAWS, grasshopper:-)

Oh, and aside from a possible PayPal donation to Peter Krantz, Fangs
is free!

Joseph O'Connor
CSUN Manager University Web Communications