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Re: Screen Readers as a Development Tool for Web Developers

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From: Joseph Sherman
Date: Jul 28, 2015 7:36AM


Hi Sean. Let me start by saying I do not use JAWS trial. However, I think there are two different issues. The trial version of JAWS is fully functional for the 40 minute time limit, so when you say "nothing was getting announced", that is not related to the trail version. The blog post you link to below refers to the terms of the JAWS EULA, which states that the trial version cannot be used for web testing. It is a licensing restriction, not a product feature restriction.



Also note that NVDA is a free, open source screen reader that can be used for testing.





Joseph





-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Sean Curtis
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 10:09 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Screen Readers as a Development Tool for Web Developers



As a developer doing quite a lot of cross browser and cross AT testing of web components, it was quite frustrating to find that the trial version of JAWS does not allow you to test web pages ( http://webaim.org/blog/jaws-license-not-developer-friendly/). I wish I'd read that before wasting an hour trying to work out what I'd done wrong when setting it up and nothing was getting announced.



I'm also lucky enough to work at a company that can afford $1000+ for a license so we can test our software. I did contact FS in regards to this, but they do not hand out free licenses to developers. I'm just thankful that most of our devs use OSX, so VoiceOver is readily available for them to do some basic Accessibility Testing of components before pushing their commits.



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Sean Curtis