Re: Screenreaders

Sadly, the data I have seen has always been of the "virtually everyone 
I know uses..." variety. In some cases, like that of ONCE in Spain, or 
similar government organisations, that information is accurate to the 
extent of identifying the majority case - 60% or more - but it is 
generally a very expensive bit of research that goes out of date 
extremely quickly, so people don't do it. You might do better to define 
much more precisely which users you mean (those who will sue? 
government employees? rich ones? all users?) or why the information is 
important.

Virtually everyone I know uses Speakup and/or Gnopernicus as their main 
screen reader in english. Blindux I think is based on yasr, but is 
essentially its own package, for people who speak spanish (more 
important to Sidar and Americans - north and south than to the rest of 
the world, but I suspect the question is only related to users in the 
US. In some languages JAWS and Window-eyes are not available at all and 
they use something else).

W3C used to have an activity trying to characterise the Web, and how 
people used it. It was packed up - I think in part because it turned 
out to be too hard to do more than guess or extrapolate from people one 
knows. (In that case the US votes overwhelmingly democrat, has a 
university degree, a passport, mostly works in high-paying jobs... ;-) 
I spend my life working with systems that are pretending to be a 
different system, so I can see how it is hard to find out what is 
really happening.

Or you could point out to your client that in any case 83% of 
statistics quoted are really just made up, and most of the rest are 
gathered with a good dose of guesswork...

cheers

Chaals

On Monday, Dec 29, 2003, at 20:27 Europe/Rome, Erika Noll Webb wrote:

>
> Does anyone have an data regarding the most prevalent screen readers?  
> I
> have a client who wants to know which VERSION of JAWs and Window Eyes 
> are
> the most prevalent right now.  Since virtually everyone I know has an 
> SMA,
> they are using the current versions.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Erika
>
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Monday, 29 December 2003 18:20:33 UTC