So all this conversion has me thinking. I initially thought that one advantage of JFW as compared to VO is the extensibility. There is a whole industry that has grown up around writing Jaws scripts and a couple people on this list wrote about earning a living with such work. Greg wrote in how he can often tweak the UI to work better with VO. Then I was thinking about AppleScript, how it is remarkably powerful, more so than anything in Windows, and available for almost all OS X applications. Apple also ships robust development tools with the OS (but so far these are not compatible with VO). There are lots more AppleScript authors than Jaws Scripters. So this prompts me to ask a couple questions:
1) How long did the Jaws Script Writing shops take to appear to on the scene? 2) Does, in fact, AppleScript offer VO users the same potential found right now with JFW scripts? I am guessing that the answer to (1) is several years, and that (2) is a big fat YES! If this conclusion is correct (and please feel free to shoot holes in the notion), the challenge then is how to jump start the paid support services (and where to get the funding). We have had a couple years now beating on 3rd party developers, and we are all impatient for things to move faster.
