Why NVDA is better than Jaws - screen reader Wars
I've been using screen readers for about 20 years now. And one trend is clear: monopolization. There are only one or two competitive products per platform. The rest have gone bankrupt or been bought out, the most recent example being Window Eyes. It was bought up and closed. To date, its market share has been steadily increasing compared to Jaws.
For some, Jaws is packed with useful features. For the others, there's a lot of hype that you never need in life. Jaws is the Microsoft Office among screen readers. They have to do something to justify the €3000 per Jaws license. It is also interesting that Jaws is much cheaper in the USA. In Germany, on the other hand, you can also pay for every major update.
Unfortunately, most blind persons didn't understand the main reason for this: NVDA is intentionally lean. Many functions are outsourced to the extensions. Most of the Jaws features are likely to be used by a tenth of a thousand blind persons. But every function can also bring bugs and slow down the software and make it confusing. The Jaws configuration manager is legendary because of its complexity.
Jaws Eats Accessibility
One of the worst news for accessibility, I think, was Whispero's acquisition of the Paciello Group. Whispero is the parent company of Jaws, Zoomtext and many other companies in this context. Incidentally, Jaws and Zoomtext are also only purchased, one wonders whether Whispero made anything himself.
Since this acquisition, TPGi, as they now call themselves, can no longer be taken seriously. All you read is Jaws here and Jaws there. There seriously is a paid tool that can be used to test applications for Jaws compatibility. So they want money to optimize software for their screen readers. The nonsense continues with Jaws Connect – this should allow Jaws users to report if they have accessibility problems. It's about the most useless tool I've heard of.
As a side note, Jaws is unfortunately unsuitable for accessibility testing. It does not adhere to accessibility standards. For example, if a form field is not labeled, Jaws tries to guess the label. This often works well and makes users happy. Just stupid for those who don't use Jaws and hear the argument "It works with Jaws".