Ian Hixie summarizes his depressing experience with the latest version of JAWS, a screen reader that makes the web accessible through speech synthesis and braille support:
I’ve actually been using the latest version of JAWS (the popular Windows screen reader software for blind people) recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. For example, JAWS will happily take the last sentence of a paragraph, and the first sentence of the next paragraph, and run them into each other as one sentence, if there’s no full stop at the end of the first paragraph. What might make my experiences with JAWS even more worrying is that I’m told JAWS is amongst the best of the available screen reader software. It certainly isn’t worth its ridiculous $895 price tag (let alone the $1095 price tag for the “professional” version I got).
Ouch, harsh words for Freedom Scientific’s UI engineers.