- From: Ian Anderson <lists@zstudio.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 20:49:39 +0100
- To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> What compelling reason could there be to have stats of this type? I can > think of some that have nothing to do with the web but none that do. I'd be interested to see information on screen reader market share. I'm consulting with a UK Internet bank presently, and we are testing in Window-Eyes 4.5, JAWS 5.0, JAWS 4.5 and IBM HomePage Reader 3.0. You get problems with the default settings in each configuration, and slightly different HTML code is required to make site features work well in each one. Often there are conflicts, where the code that works well in JAWS causes a rendering issue in Window-Eyes, or vice versa. While I don't believe in trying to design the accessible experience (because it's impossible :), where there are conflicts I tend to lean towards the JAWS 4.5 rendering if there are choices to be made, because I estimate that this is the largest user base. In six months time, that may not be the case, and this is why information about market share would be useful. It's a situation analogous to the old dilemmas facing web designers when we cared about NN4 versus IE4 rendering of pages. That was solved as the modern browsers began supporting the standards more consistently, so that the latest versions of IE, NN, Opera, Mozilla, and so on all render pages 95% consistently or better. Since the screen readers differ so much in their rendering of standard HTML constructs, there are necessary decisions to be made. If there were no conflicts, I wouldn't care so much about market share. Perhaps in a few years the manufacturers of screen readers will get their act together, but in the meantime the reality is that someone will always get a poorer experience, and web designers are back to juggling the numbers again to decide which way to jump for each design choice. Incidentally, I'm talking about screen readers here because they have rendering differences that affect the user experience in significant ways, and are highly affected by small differences in the coding of a page. Screen magnifiers typically are not, for example, so that's why I'm talking about screen readers in particular. Anyone else wrestled with screen reader rendering differences, and have any tips? Cheers Ian Anderson zStudio
Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2004 15:53:04 UTC