assistive-technology

assistive technology

This page is for documenting currently known accessibility assistive technologies (implementations) that are being used in the wild for the purpose of testing any particular microformats and microformats techniques to determine their impact on assistive technologies.

What to add

Only accessible assistive technologies

Rather than duplicating lists elsewhere on the Web (e.g. Wikipedia's Comparison of screen readers), please only add assistive technologies that you, or someone you know (such as a user of an assistive technology that you are in touch with) has access to for testing purposes. This will help keep the testing "real world" on an ongoing basis, because if no one has access to an assistive technology, then testing it is an unreasonable (purely theoretical) expectation.

Please provide

When adding an assistive technology to the list(s) below, please provide:

• Your name / name of person who has access to the assistive technology for testing purposes
• Name of assistive technology
• URL to home page for the technology, and URL(s) to purchase if available
• version number
• when published/released
• estimated number of users if known (even rough estimates are ok), along with date of estimate (ideally with a citation).

Note their bugs too

In addition, by keep tracking of various different assistive technologies, their versions, their bugs/shortcomings, and any non-standards-compliant behavior, especially when such behavior interferes with microformats on the page, we can focus our efforts on suggesting improvements for them accordingly.

Screen Readers

General marketshare numbers for screen readers:

• 2003 USA: JAWS 65%, GW-Micro Window-Eyes 35%. According to a study of screen reader use published in December 2003, a spokesperson for the US National Federation of the Blind estimated that in the USA, JAWS had 65% of the screen reader market and GW-Micro Window-Eyes had 35%; also JAWS was the software most commonly used by U.S. federal workers.

JAWS

Publisher: Freedom Scientific Total users as of 2002: "There are approximately 80,000 registered users of JAWS" - Chris Hofstader of Freedom Scientific. Presumably world-wide users of any version of JAWS.

• JAWS. version: 8 (latest), published ????, ???? users.
• JAWS. version: 7 (latest), published ????, ???? users (the most commonly used version of JAWS).
• JAWS. version: 6 (latest), published ????, ???? users ("many correspondents").
• JAWS. version: 5 (latest), published ????, ???? users ("some few correspondents").
• JAWS. version: 4.51 (latest), published ????, ???? users ("some few correspondents").
• ...

GW Micro Window Eyes

• ...

MicroPower Virtual Vision

Brazilian screen reader.

See Also

• accessibility
• assistive-technology-abbr-results