I haven't tried Jaws 15, and I can't imagine it being better, stronger,
or faster than previous versions. My experience is that each version of
Jaws gets slower, that the new features are gimicky, and that bugs take
a while to get corrected, so I've been upgrading only when I have to.
For example, I'm using Jaws 13 on my Windows 7 machine because it works
just fine. I bought a Windows 8 laptop to learn Narrator. Narrator is
tantalizingly close, but it's not ready yet to be a screen reader. I
held off on buying Jaws 14 for it until I actually had a few scary
moments with my main computer, but I haven't installed it because I'm
working on getting better acquainted with NVDA.
At this point, I hang on to Jaws because it does a few things better on
some advanced features of Word, which I use a lot, and on a few features
of another program I use for translating.
NVDA handles other programs equally well, and it handles the web a lot
better. In fact, more and more, I find myself automatically switching to
NVDA for web tasks because Jaws frequently fails to correctly identify
items as things I can click, and it also fails to activate them even
with cursor routing and mouse simulation. When I was relying on Jaws,
I'd go to a website and find myself performing some tasks with Firefox
and others with Internet Explorer because Jaws wasn't letting me click,
because Jaws had focus issues, and because Jaws was inconsistent about
refreshing the screen. Since I've started using NVDA more often, I can
go to a page in one browser or the other and stick with a single screen
reader. NVDA isn't perfect, but the experience is smoother and more
reliable over all.
I too am waiting for Narrator to finish growing up. True accessibility
is off-the-shelf at no additional cost.
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