V-Base Development Blog

Just tried our VBase 3 smart client with the Windows XP Narrator and a commercial equivalent called JAWS. According to the Wikipedia article on screen readers JAWS is quite a popular application (would love to hear Joe public’s opinion on that). I have not spent a great deal of time accessing either of these applications and so don’t want anyone to take my word on them as the definitive evaluation but I was surprised to find out that the Windows XP narrator application actually managed to read an entry on a WPF combo-box that the JAWS application failed to read. JAWS was much better on response and seemed to deal with menus in a more appropriate manner and also has features like a braille reader that I’m sure makes it more valuable to certain users than the XP narrator could ever hope to be. We will over the next few days be spending more time on accessibility and will have to as part of this investigate what Vista has to offer on the screen reader front. Hopefully Vista will have advanced from the XP narrator tool and will resolve some of the issues we currently have with accessibility for visually impaired users.