The Jaws Screen Reader is an advanced screen reader.
It is an incredibly powerful piece of software able to read any component on the user's screen. It tries to incorporate sound queues into every event on the user's screen. This is immediately apparently upon installation of the product. While the progress bar fills, little ticking sounds can be heard, indicating progression in the installation. When browsing on the web, it reads the text in the title bar as well as the first heading in the web page. It goes on to describe the elements on the page such as the number of links and the element that the cursor is currently selected on, for instance a text box prompt. It also tells the user which key they have pressed while typing.
At times, with the increasing amount of content on the page, the audio description from Jaws is overwhelming. For blind novice computer users, this software is intimidating. Trying to navigate JAWS' menu to slow the speech down proved to be difficult. And as with almost all accessibility tools I have reviewed so far, the screen readers fail to detect JavaScript of Flash objects from pages.
Overall, the information from JAWS is rich. I can definitely help a blind user illustrate a detailed picture of the current state of his/her screen. Though, it may take some time to get used to the initial speed of the voice speech. What would be a nice feature would be a way to repeat the speech. In the time I had to experiment with this tool, I was unable to find such a feature.
