Hi Dennis, I switched from jaws, after about 10 years, to WE, about a year ago. It's fine if you really want to contact me privately to discuss this, but I'd suggest a public discussion is much better. others could correct or disagree with any points I would make, and they could add to anything I may have forgotten. I think you'll get better info this way, and if there are those who wish to say anything negative, and they don't wish to say it on list, they can still contact you privately. I switched because I found the FS customer service to be completely unresponsive; and this was a condition which continued over many instances spanning many years. I also switched when I first read of the GW plans for scripting. I could see immediately what a *huge* benefit such a scripting system would be towards allowing many more programs to become accessible. Not only is the GW scripting tool a fantastic tool for making an application accessible, it's also a tool (if you'll forgive the pun) which is accessible to the masses. so, if you and a few others are using a program that's not used by millions, and it has some accessibility problems, it's very likely one of you could write and publish a script to correct these problems. no more begging the screen reader vendor to fix this program in the next release, and being told by them that it's just not used by enough of their customers to be worth the time of the vendor. it's now in the hands of the users themselves. this is tremendously empowering! Yes, you could say jaws has the same scripting capability; but, I tried for years to work with jaws scripts, and found the entire process excruciatingly difficult, and poorly documented and/or supported. And to prove my point, there has been an explosion of WE scripts since the capability became available; I'd say more than all jaws scripts ever published. How has my own experience been as a WE user verses being a jaws user? Well, I have a paid up copy of jaws with 2 SMAs, and I haven't used it in about a year. that's the telling point I think. I find the support to be much more responsive. are they always right? if WE always the better screen reader for a given program? well, no on both points. But, GW cares about being right (helping you solve your problem), and they care about making their product better. I think they'd like to make some money along the way too. In my opinion FS cares about making money; if they make their product better along the way, how nice for you! but it's not their motivation. You can see the difference in the last (largely bug-fix) release of WE, which was free, while pretty much every release of jaws has been a paid upgrade, no matter how little new functionality was introduced. I'm sure you could get down to the level of arguing which reader was the better reader application by application; but seldom is this what decides anyone. most of us have to use a wide range of applications, so that kind of comparison is rarely helpful I think. Finally, for those who aren't lucky enough to have someone purchase your reader for you, GW offers a choice of purchasing plans involving a series of small payments. Last time I checked, FS had nothing like it; you simply had to come up with all the money up front. if you aren't sure about switching to WE, then why not rent it for a month? shouldn't cost you too much to try it that way. ok, I guess I've hit the high points for me as to why I switched; let me know if you have any questions. hth, Chip
------------------------------ Chip Orange Database Administrator Florida Public Service Commission [email protected] (850) 413-6314 (Any opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Florida Public Service Commission.) ________________________________ From: dennis [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 10:48 AM To: [email protected] Subject: we vs jfw could people who used both contac me? strongly thinkin of going to we want to know advantages and dis advantages of both If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
