Folks,
You know what? All this talk about how great Active Accessibility is and
such will be blown out the window before too long. Fine, Window Eyes makes
reading some web pages continuously a bit faster right now. I hope HJ
incorporates this technology sooner than later.
But with more and more web pages using Java applets and all that kind of
technology, I suspect that Active Accessibility and this loading of a
standard HTML page into a MSAA buffer isn't going to work for too long down
the road on an increasing amount of the web.
And when push comes to shove, it is still accessible web design and
including things like alt-tags and such that makes the real difference in
how well a web page works, no matter what screen reader one is using. No
amount of MSAA, page reformatting or whatever you want can tell you what
that image is unless it has an alt-tag.
Plus there's more than just browsing the web. There are features that JFW
has in Excel and Word (namely the table navigation in Word and the cell
lists in Excel) that blow Window-Eyes out of the water. I work with these
two programs daily and I can tell you that having those features makes what
I need to do in those applications much more productive. I can show you
several Window-Eyes users who switched to JFW because of those very features.
So go out, get the demos and pick the screen reader that meets your needs.
None are perfect and all hype up their product.
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Visit the jfw ml web page: http://jfw.cjb.net
