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You Know They’re Scared When They’re Resorting To “Two Guys In A Garage”

Recently, I was told by more than one person who had a private meeting with VFO salespeople at CSUN 2017 that the guys trying to sell JAWS are telling those who buy enterprise site licenses that “NVDA is just two guys working in a garage, if they’re hit by a bus, the whole thing disappears.”

NVDA: Now More Than Ever!
I’d like to talk a little bit about the “two-guys-in-a-garage” argument. Chris goes on to demonstrate why it’s completely false in NVDA’s case. But even if it were completely true, it’s still one of the most short-sighted arguments that can be used against FLOSS. “Two-Guys-In-A-Garage” is the argument you make when you have nothing else. You can’t prove that your functionality is better, so you try to argue in favor of scarcity.

We’re at the point where Jaws for Windows, (the so-called best-in-class screen reader), is aping NVDA, (its FLOSS rival), in order to stay relevant. This is especially evident when it comes to the web, where NVDA shines and where Jaws for Windows continues to lag behind. And unfortunately for VFO, (the parent company behind Jaws for Windows), the web their screen reader struggles with is the thing that’s eating the world. Everything is going web. It’s not just pages anymore, it’s applications now too. And Jaws for Windows can’t keep up with NVDA in this arena.

I, like a lot of other people in this community, was devastated by the news that Window Eyes is being discontinued. But NVaccess and the rest of the NVDA community are providing us with the freedom and choice that the big player believes they have the right to take away from us, and this is very heartening. So NVDA, you keep being you and doing what you do best, because when VFO crashes and burns, I want to be first in line to dance on its grave with a drink in both hands.


Comments

  • Agreed Amanda! I can personally attest to the impressively open-source NVDA being quite a great screen reader option. I have used NVDA since the very early days back in late 07/08. Back in those days, NVDA was a mostly unknown open-source screen reader project. The functionality of NVDA back then was quite humble – if usable for basic tasks. Back then, I would have rated NVDA somewhere slightly better than Narrator in Win XP. However, I’ve always known that NVDA had massively more potential. NVDA has always gone about the screen reader process differently from JAWS, (since JAWS uses video grabs). Basically, JAWS installs itself as an additional video driver. JAWS grabs graphical information that is sent to the display. For this reason, JAWS can introduce very problematic, unique conflicts and errors. NVDA works on a secondary subtext buffer concept. Essentially – NVDA loads documents and other on-screen content into a buffer file in memory. The NVDA text buffer has nothing to do with the video drivers on a PC, and thus almost never introduces video-related conflicts. Moreover, I can attest to the growing global effort that is NVDA because since 2011, I have not only been a user of NVDA, but a volunteer beta tester for the program. The project now has developers, users, and testers in many parts of the world, and whom speak many languages. Thus, the massive number of supported languages for NVDA. NVDA now boasts impressive abilities and functionality that in many cases surpasses that of JAWS. The JAWS team has continued to isolate JAWS as a profit-first, highly proprietary product. That is leading to it’s slow, expensive demise. Open source, grassroots efforts such as NVDA are changing the world because they are bringing abilities and accessibility to the world without discriminating based on income.

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