If Screen Readers Were Airlines

I'd say Voice Over airways is probably the boeing disaster. It's over 20 years old, doesn't get updated except with now 40 plus year old technology, that's just so it can say it supports new languages. I'd rather have somewhat current software then something that well meaning can not be updated. I'm happy Apple supports more languages, but now they want shiny planes and just use the Voice Over to hopefully not have to many delays. Yes, I use a Mac so I can speak with authority on this. :)

Hi Kevin,
I like your article. My question in the subject line is a rhetorical one. Everybody uses their devices differently. I primarily use NVDA on Windows because it works the best with Google Docs which I need for my job. I still keep JAWS around just in case it works better for something than NVDA. And yes, I pay for the upgrades. The truth is that JAWS handles formatting in MS Word better than NVDA does. There have been times where I have had to deal with more complex Word documents. NVDA still doesn't announce list items correctly in Word for some reason! Even though I've enabled it. Narrator on Windows 10 and 11 handles formatting in Word in some respects better than JAWS does. It seems to be more accurate when announcing formatting changes. I used to like System Access back in the day, never really tried Window Eyes though. VoiceOver for the iPhone and iPad is pretty good, I hardly encounter bugs because I use my iPhone and iPad for pretty basic tasks. The thing I like about Windows is having multiple screen readers. So if something doesn't work with one, it might work with another.

Hi Lottie,
I had forgotten about SuperNova. I wonder if it has any benefits over JAWS or NVDA? I wonder how many people use it. It never seems to be prominent on the screen reader survey.

I am laughing so hard right now so thanks for this

Two similar airlines that have planes without wings. The only requirement is that every passenger be avionics design engineers.

After dacades of every automobile manufacturer producing cars with nearly identical designs, one manufacturer would release a radical redesign in which the steering wheel has been replaced with a joystick. The manufacturer would declare it as a breakthrough innovation that makes steering easier. Drivers would all abandon their existing automobiles and buy the new joystick model, baffled as to how they ever steered without it. Next year, every manufacturer around the world would also release joystick-only automobiles. A few people would continue to drive the antiques. Their grandkids would climb in the car, point at the steering wheel, and say, "what's that?"

The talkback one made me laugh, I still use a few of those angle gestures. Also chromevox airlines is a great way to fly to gMail Snandardview in relative comfort for anyone who may still be looking to go there.

They are so awesome, hope voiceover adds them one day and if you don’t like them you don’t need to use them

I think I'd get rid of angle gestures if I could even though I like them. People complain talkback isn't as snappy as voiceover, they're right and this is a big part of why. If talkback always has to wait a tiny bit to make sure there's no up swipe coming after that right flick it will inevitably slow down the phone a little unless they let you toggle off angle detection in talkback settings or something. That would probably have all sorts of other unintended consequences otherwise they likely would have done it by now I think. anyways for any curious readers this lag isn't huge, it doesn't feel like it slows me down much at all but it's there, you'll probably feel the difference compared to voiceover.

CSR also has angle gestures and is as fast as voiceover from my testing

This is not a new airline at all, though a lot of potential passengers haven't heard about it. Desspite this it is getting more attention. ZDSR Air operates sort of a low cost business model where even free tickets are possible. Their planes are custom-made and very much optimised for fuel efficiency and the highest possible air speed. They usually fly strictly on schedule and eventual delays are negligible. They fly even to very exotic and remote destinations, even to ones with ridiculously short runways which may not be asphalted at all. For really adventurous passengers helicopter flights can also be booked. One particularity of this airline that embarasses many passengers is that the crew, officers and flight assistants speak a quite exotic language with awkward phonetic features whicch most cannot grasp easily. In-flight systems are also very advanced, but partly written in a language with incomprehensible character shapes. But if you somehow manage to decypher this, then at ZDSR Air you will be greeted with a friendly smile, a warm handshake and even an applause as bonus! So check them out if you can!

This market player has a lot in common with ZDSR Air. They business model is also budget / low cost. They not just custom make their planes, but encourage users to take part in improving existing flight components or putting them together in very new ways for a truly remarkable flight experience. They are unique in the market in allowing important flight instruments and components from certain companies that are rejected by other, still more popular airlines. Language barriers are present here too and thhis is made a bit more intriguing by very extensive, but non-standard flight documenting systems which even trained crews often mix up. In-flight catering is very ample, bbut often given to the wrong passenger (who ordered something else instead). These are due to mostly language issues. However as a plus, no flight assistant gets embarassed in such a situation and always keeps his/her friendliness and politeness.

I'd forgotten about Commentary, I had some security concerns a while back but you're right, I do remember angle gestures there. I'm actually not surprised they can control that better than Google, Commentary impressed and also kind of terrified me. Does it still send random bits of data out somewhere without terms and conditions? Maybe it was logging and sending the speech output which, yes, I'm not naive enough to think google doesn't have that already it still bothered me without any kind of privacy policy or explanation.

This is a bit of a misnomer as it is really an airline and not a company that sells sea cruises. They are present in the market for around 20 years now, but still get little attention. And this is unfortunately because in an early phase in their existence they built up bad reputation. "Mayday" and "pan-pan" signs were frequent from their cockpits, flights were troubled by autopilot errors, and engine failures and cabin pressure leaking were not uncommon too. However more recently Orca management set focus on tackling all these issues. They initiated a massive plane refurbishment and acquisition action plan. Their new motto is "safe flight for the masses to more and more destinations". Their planes have a remarkable and distinct design philosophy, and flight parts from other airlines usually cannot be cross-licensed on their models. Their logo has a striking resemblance to a penguin, although they denied that being intentional many times on various platforms.

This airline is fairly new and flite attendents dont know english vary well but will try to get you where you are going, if you want snacks you will have to talk vary slow and be specific
Enjoy

I was already about to post about it before I found out that @laszlo was quicker to do that. So ZDSR Air would be a company that would make you fly by gliders or balloons so as to burn as little fuel as possible unless you would be willing to pay for it yourself, as even certain basic functionality offered by not only NVDA but also Narrator is paid if you want to have it in ZDSR. And just as gliders being lighter than other types of aircraft, ZDSR is incredibly fast and responsive compared to the old and sluggish JAWS and even the lightweight competitor NVDA. The weird accent that the English voice installed as part of the screen reader has, on the other hand, resembles a flight attendant that can work at such a company that does its best to lower costs as much as possible so doesn't care that much about accents and stuff. By the way, let's not forget that you can always prefer other alternatives like Shine Plus, Spiel and even Code Factory's Mobile Accessibility Suite for Android or Nokia Screen Reader and Mobile Speak for Symbian, or Talks&Zooms by Nuance Communications International BVBA, again, for Symbian. Although not a screen reader per se, certain Nokia models came with this thing called Voice Aid. Others like the E72 had what is called the "Konuşan Tema" in Turkish, which should be either Speaking Theme or Spoken Theme in English. Oh, I also have the installers for various other screen readers by Turkish, Indian and Chinese developers for Windows on my computer. Finally, there is the Japanese PC Talker. Finally, I once read a post on the audiogames.net forum by someone with the user name "Nuno" something (I don't remember his exact nickname.) that outlined a concise history of Chinese screen readers for Windows and Symbian.

It made me smile, the comment on vo, assuming we put it for macos, is half true but heading toward the right direction.
Great message, +1 @Kevin Shaw !!

I like this thread too. I'm unsure at this time which I'll fly next time I travel. I don't even know at this point that I'll travel by plane at all again, lol. But this is good. I've used most but not all of these, and of course now I'm happily using VoiceOver. I mainly use speech output, but I have started using my HumanWare eReader and am impressed with it.

ASAP Air hasn't flown for over thirty years, but was a very reliable airline. ASAP Air's passengers always flew to their destination without a hitch. No need to tell them where you want to go or what you'd like to snack on, they always just know. If you don't have a ticket, that's ok, they'll still take you there, but will remind you every now and then that you don't have a ticket. ASAW air, on the other hand, was owned by ASAP's snooty little brother. THey also claimed to be able to read your mind, but often got stuck in some of the strangest holding patterns ever seen. Together, ASAP Air and ASAW air covered the continent, but never shared air space. The only way to transfer from one to the other was to fly to the center of the continent to change planes.

Some of voiceover airs plains jump up into the sky randomly without warning and can get stuck in holding patterns at times but will get you where your going

PS, this is all in good fun

NVDA Air has announced that it has finally launched an extensive modernization program to replace its outdated and degraded planes with pristine ones. The NVDA 2024.1 update promises a smoother experience, but the update might have broken some things. No, it's not add-on compatibility I am referring to. Explorer somehow often stops responding, and has required me to resort to the Windows Task Manager to terminate the process more than once. The overall experience is still fine, but I wish thorougher testing had been carried out to ensure more stability. The new release does sound promising indeed though, as a result of such a long-awaited step that addresses complaints about unresponsiveness that would make flights more challenging over WhatsAppland or in territories like the Windows File Explorer. The massive modernization program appears to have equipped the company's fleet with more durable aircraft capable of flying in harsher conditions, which may bring NVAir closer to ZDSR Air in terms of responsiveness. The add-on compatibility issue, while understandable, is annoying. While it's a fact that newer planes require newer components, other airline companies like JAWS Air still does a good job of preserving backward compatibility for those demanding updates without having to adopt new methods and standards with almost each and every update. You know, being a pilot is a highly-demanding task, but this should not necessarily mean that you have to find the required components, and in some cases, even get used to the new planes you switch to, or set up everything from scratch.

Jaws for airlines is alright for you, jaws for airlines is alright for you, jaws for airlines is alright for you, jaws for airlines is alright foooooor youuuuuuu.

If anyone gets that, I'll not only be shocked but give you a cookie.

I do get it

So give me my cooky lol

Is it a play on "JAWS for Windows is ready"?

So the OP mentions that the term "airlines" was first used in a 1995 post elsewhere to refer to operating systems, so "JAWS for Airlines" might become "JAWS for Windows" in that case. JAWS would say "JAWS for Windows is ready." when enabled, so I probably need to figure out what the "alright for you" stands for here. Well, my deduction might not make sense, but I've not been able to come up with anything more convincing.

@ Joshua you didn't tell the class what it was so I'll give you half a cookie. @the other two: nope, that wasn't what it was.

Spoiler for those that care.

I can't find it now but I'll let you know what it was. There was a little song that went, jaws for windows is bad for you, and repeated that 3 more times and then said, jaws for windows is very baaaaaad for youuuuuu. I don't know if it was actual jaws singing it though, it was in a very old decktalk archive.

end of spoilers

If others want to guess feel free, that's why I was a jenious and used a heading, it didn't take me about 15 minutes to read another applevis thread, and I didn't have to look at the code of the website then realise that if I'd read the comment correctly I would have been done in 1 minute, nope, not me.

I didn't understand the last 4 messages but for nvda, although I find them a little quicker to break apis, remember that for about 10 if not more years they were stuck on python 2.7 so they are recovering from that trauma. Moreover in the nvda rss I follow through an rss to email service (very useful) they told that for nvda 2024.1 they have been telling addon devs about the deprocation for eight months and most of them were ready. If nvaccess can already implement a native selection on firefox now even if they parse the web content to a virtual buffer then safari and some of its bugs on macos are even more frustrating to acknowledge an deal with. Apple may very have been the first to modernize how screen reader should interact with web content at the beginning of the 2000-2010s (I read this somewhere if not on applevis), they are clearly very behind now. ... Voiceover on mac is more like an old wwe2 aircraft that is only flying because some engeneers are putting scotch tape on it so it can somehow still be in the sky although shaking whenever there is too much turbulence (how it poorly handels what is apparently large ui content for him, triggering SNR on the .txt plain text ±9k characters file of icann tld list when the pilot wants it to go more than three arrow key presses per seconds). Anyway.

Well, I still guessed it right that "Airlines" would refer to "Windows", so can I get at least some tiny portion of the cookie?

I will happily take half a cooky

Half a cookie for @joshua and @eens gets a quarter.

Thanks! Speaking of cookies and fractions, this made me think about Siri's response when asked what would zero divided by zero be equal to. It would say something about the Cookie Monster.

İ had dabbled with SuperNova. back when it was Hal, mainly because it was the only screen reader that had Arabic support at the time. İt had several other languages at a time when İ don't remember JAWS having much beyond the basic 10, İ think that's what keeps it going, people who were use to it from when JAWS didn't offer their languages. İ don't remember it having any significant advantage.

I didn't know this fact (that it was the only screen reader to have support for Arabic in the past), but having to download and use different installers for each language and even dialect packaged with voices supporting that language or dialect in 2024 is not what most would prefer, especially when there are several other alternatives like JAWS and the free NVDA and even Microsoft's built-in Narrator. Orpheus was unique though.

I love soooo much this line this is so true especially for macos, the thing is that you actually notice when the plain explodes, you feel the cold of outside. You can also lack oxygen sometimes. But you can be sure that even when you don't see anything outside and there is -1 visibility and that the world seem to be in the making the plain will be here from the beginning, giving you a sense of direction nothing else can, or nothing else that you don't have to assemble yourself. Now you can even control which real button on the remote does what for the intertainment system in the front of you.
"For no reason whatsoever, your plane explodes mid-flight. As you fall towards the ground, another airplane suddenly materializes around you and you continue flying as if nothing happened."
Anybody remembers oralux? I tried this first in 2018. To breathe in this plane you must manually set your oxigen level when you are on your seet. All the controls are like alien things nobody knows. And to walk in there you had something like links2 or equivalent and the floor doesn't support the modern shues that are so common now.
PS: This thread deserves an anual or 2 year update to keep up with the latest upgrade in the airplains world.

I do know of an Oralux, but it is most likely not what you are talking about. This was a whole Linux OS on a CD derived from early Knoppix. It used Emacspeak or a different setup with Yasr, depending on how you booted it. My first go at stepping away from Windows back in the XP days, and was not too useful to me, yet still intriguing at the time. A rooster was the mascot, and I seem to remember it making a rooster sound upon loading, like the one that lives a block over from me now... So maybe an airline that doesn't quite get too far off the ground.

Yes that's exactly I'm talking about. Basically at first boot you had to increase the volume which was at 0 by default or something like that.

Eighteen or so years ago when I was using that one.
The thing that makes me sad about a lot of people's complaints about Orca and Linux is they have tried a distro derived from a snapshot of a distro derived from another snapshot of an unstable or testing version of a distribution of Linux, and it's... unstable. So instead of learning how to use it on a stable version that doesn't crash a lot and so on, they get something that has accessibility apps, but crashes a lot or has an enviroment that doesn't work yet with Orca and assume all distributions of Linux are like that, and that Orca just doesn't work. I'll be the first to tell you Orca doesn't have all the bells and whistles though, and you have to do some gear shifting to drive it.
I can't think of an airline like that off the top of my head.

Light, swift and gets the job done. Add-Ons make it a great utility