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Market share for screen readers

for

From: John Goldthwaite
Date: Jul 15, 2002 5:27AM

I don't know of a good source for that information other than calling each
of the vendors and asking them to share the number of copies they have sold.
That still won't be perfectly accurate since many users may have a 2 or more
and use one at home and other at work or have stopped using an older one.

JAWS has more powerful features for customizing it to work better with
particular Windows programs or applets. You can create scripts that JAWS
loads automatically when you switch into the window for the application.
These are stored in the c:JAWSSettingsenu folder so you can take a look
at them to see what they look like. Its easier to cusomize JAWS for some
Legacy softare so its more widely used in government and many businesses.
For example I've programmed Jaws profiles for the FEDWIRE and MONEYNET wire
transfer systems that have dozens of screens. I set the profile up so that
it parses the screen content and behaves appropriately for each screen. The
result is reliable enough that the banks don't have problems with their
blind employees sending or processing wire transfers involving millions of
dollars each day.

Windoweyes can also be customized for each program but its features are
limited to creating Hotkeys with 3 features each, custom reading windows and
a few other things. These profiles also load automatically when you switch
into the window for an application. Windoweyes is a little easier to learn
than JAWS but both are pretty sofisticated programs.

IBM HomePage reader is just a talking browser so it works pretty well for
that but its not a general screen reader like JAWS or Windoweyes. JAWS is
optimized to work best with Internet Explorer, it has a profile for Netscape
but its very primitive compared to the IE script. I believe Windoweyes is
optimized for Netscape but I haven't checked on that.

There are a number of other screenreaders whose market share will vary by
country:
SynthaVoice