WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Screen Readers as a Development Tool for Web Developers

for

From: _mallory
Date: Jul 28, 2015 11:22PM

The argument about "if you're already paying good money for your other
tools, JAWS should be no diferent" makes plenty of sense if you work
for a medium/large company or a media bureau (those shops that make the
brochureware slick marketing websites for big clients... those folks
have those nice big monitors and macs).

And obviously people who are employed and can afford things in general
shouldn't come above disabled users who need these products and esp
if they are not employed or poorly employed due to their disability(ies).
If developers got a discount, shouldn't blind students/seniors/etc too?
(as an example)

But make no mistake, there's a lot of us who work all our work with
only free tools and 2nd hand machines running VMs to attempt to test
all areas. My company gets zero Mac testing, because nobody owns one
and my company even balked at the idea of 19 US dollars per month for
BrowserStack. I don't even think it costs that much now.

That said, all my JAWS testing I've ever done was against the EULA.

_mallory

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 10:45:33PM +0100, Guy Hickling wrote:
> I feel honoured to talk with the earlier correspondent, I don't often get
> to mix with people who can dismiss nearly a thousand quid so casually! I
> wish I could do the same. However, I do think it is good to remember what
> accessibility developers are doing here, often at their own cost with no
> assistance from an employer. We are helping blind people which, I think,
> ought to qualify us for some consideration from manufacturers of the tools.
>
> But are we just helping blind people? No, we are also helping Freedom
> Scientific, the makers of JAWS. If we can test our websites to be sure they
> work with their product, that will make for a better experience for their
> users. This in turn would encourage other blind people to select that
> reader, and help it to retain it's currently top position.
>
> On the other hand, if we developers have to restrict ourselves to testing
> with NVDA, and any screen reader that bothers to assist developers by
> providing developer copies, because of the cost otherwise, then NVDA users
> will increasingly have the better experience while JAWS users experience
> glitches and untested for bugs in the websites they visit. That can only
> help NVDA continue to gain in popularity.
>
> I would have thought that simple self-interest would encourage Freedom
> Scientific to assist developers better, but apparently not.
> > > >