For example, we can say that there are about twice as many JAWS users than NVDA users.

As such, its results may be heavily biased and its representativeness may be limited.Īlso, we only gain an outline about rough proportions, but no detailed data about absolute statistics. Like every other survey, the WebAIM screen reader survey is expected to reach a rather deterministic sample only: exclusively screen reader users who somehow got to know about the survey and were eager to fill it out are included. Around 58% of the roughly speaking 1200 responses came from North America and 27% from Europe. The most recent survey was conducted in August - September 2019 ( WebAIM's Screen Reader User Survey #8). The initiative Web Accessibility In Mind () conducts regular surveys among users of assistive software, which gives us at least some insight into the topic. And in combination with which browsers they are used.How widely different screen readers are used.As such, they do not send anything like user agent data or similar to the server, making it impossible to identify them programmatically.

Screen readers aren't an integral part of the browser: they simply 'sit' on top of it, announcing the available contents to the user. Otherwise just skip the rest of this page. If you are interested to find out more about the reasoning behind this, continue reading. Notice: an exception from this rule is valid in closed environments, where only specific browsers or screen readers are available. We have had good experiences with taking the following pragmatic approach, namely aiming at the most widely used combinations (newest stable versions): Mobile screen readers It is impossible to develop and test for dozens of possible combinations of browsers and screen readers. Adding screen readers to the mixture does not make things easier: a long list of screen readers can potentially be combined with another long list of browsers, each combination possibly having its own characteristics.

Diverging requirements in closed environmentsĪs web developers, we're aware of how hard it is to support all relevant devices, operating systems, and browsers.

Other requirements may only apply in closed environments that are only open to a specific, deterministic group of users. To reach as many users as possible, it's a pragmatic approach to support the most widely used combinations of browsers and screen readers. Relevant combinations of screen readers and browsers

Nvda screen reader vs jaws