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Re: Differences Between Testing With JAWS And NVDA

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From: Steve Green
Date: Mar 18, 2022 8:43AM

We don't change anything from the default except the speech rate.

With regard to the differences, it depends on the objective of the testing. When doing a WCAG audit, we mostly use screen readers to help us understand the code, not to actually test anything. For this purpose, any differences are irrelevant. With extremely few exceptions, you should not be making pass / fail decisions on the basis of screen reader behaviours. Decisions should be based on inspection of the code and user interface.

We do use screen readers to test that ARIA live regions are working correctly because it can be difficult or impossible to test this by code inspection, depending on how it has been implemented. We see some differences, such as JAWS announcing messages twice, but usually these are just peculiarities of the screen readers and coding methods and don't affect the pass / fail decision.

When doing an expert review, we are interested in the user experience, so we test with both JAWS and NVDA with the aim of achieving a website that works well with both of them. As such, it doesn't matter if one is more "correct" than the other. There are people out there using both of them, so websites need to work well with both.

In my experience, most of the differences in behaviour arise from bad coding that would violate one or more WCAG success criteria. If a website is fully WCAG 2.1 AA conformant, there are not usually many differences.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd