Announcing a New Project: Building a JAWS-Inspired Screen Reader for macOS

I have both Windows and macOS, with the former being a virtual machine with JAWS, because i don't know the URL by heart to download NVDA. I plan to install it. JAWS, i'm relearning, to keep my skills. I'm not sure how much of the Vispero screen reader you want to emmulate, ,,, it surtainly does a lot! I am beta testing TurnOver as well. it'll be interesting how they will differ. send me a download link when your screen reader has a first build. Competition is always a good thing. how will you code it? if it's yourself, that's a Win Win, because you won't need to pay for tokens. what programming language will it be written in, and with both intel and apple silicon macs be supported? i have an old intel macbook air, i use for tinkering. my primary mac is an m 5 macbook pro, which I use for beta testing. I personally have no data on it, I don't mind restoring, as it's stored in one of many cloud services; and, you get more bugs this way. more bug reports, mean more fixes, after all. i'm sure there will be bugs in your first build.

Is this a joke? What's the point of such an ambitious announcement with nothing to show? Are you even aware of the challenges ahead of you? Do you really think you can pull this off without community assistance?

I'm interested! As a Jaws user, I know that this is going to take off very well. so send me the download link when it's ready. Looking forward to testing it!

As someone who has used Windows for 10+ years and has just now bought a Mac, I believe I am the type of person that could both benefit from this and also provide valuable feedback since I am accustomed to how Windows works for daily tasks. Because I am a student, my work primarily revolves around Office apps (Excel/Word), web browsing, media consumption and AI tools. I would be willing to help shape the future of this program and text extensively.

Go for it.

No need to be so dismissive. There’s an announcement on here because they’re trying to gage interest if he would want something like this. That should be encouraged rather than just automatically dismissed and calling it. A joke isn’t cool either. I think this is awesome. This should be commended. It might even make me switch to a Mac once it’s ready. I’m so used to the way jaws and windows works that if we could have something that’s jaws like on a Mac I might actually try a Mac someday. You never know. But with people‘s attitude like that it’s definitely not being very supportive. I think this is an awesome idea.

Too can play that game so here goes...
Do you have any idea how discouraging your words can be to new developers or people trying new projects? Do you realise that by your, dismissive arrogant attitude you can easily drive people away? If you going to post discouraging stuff like the above, what's the point? Your waisting everyone's time who reads it, and yeah, you waisted wat; 30 seconds to maybe 2 minutes writing that, non constructive post. Have reservations? Fine, but putting them here especially the way they come across? Not helping.
You don't have to be an, parden my language, an ass to get your point across. And no, before you say oh Insult? No; read the context. You can be direct without beeing, how to put it; condescending towards others. You could've said something like,
This will take time, and community effort, you should be aware that you might fall into x, y, and z pitfalls along the way.
The tldr? Think before you post.
Plus, guess who also does this all the time? Sirtain entities called oh I don't know... mainstream developers? Companies? You name it. I.e, ever seen say, oh so an so series or book etc will come out in 2028! Yeah its announced and yet? Nothing to show until... trailer, book etc comes out. This is no different.

Why won't I because of comments like above. The majority of the community doesn't appreciate what people try to do for it so screw it why should I spend hours to try and help? I just can't believe the attitudes of the community. and yes I'm speaking directly like the negative comments earlier in this thread. so when your comments make you come across as an ass remember that. I agree with the other person who said you could've been a lot more constructive and how is this diffent from a main stream company saying version 8 or 9 of x product will be out a year or 6 month before it is. Sighted people don't complain like the blind community.

Same. Not as far as with scren readers but with other projects I've been working on. They'll be accessible because yeah, but, i'm, the blind comunity isn't my target audience, not my primary one anyway because of, yeah, stuff like the above, as an example.
To be fair though, people like that are in the minority. Now. They tend to be the loudest minority which tends to be the problem. But as a whole? Its not bad. Well that and yeah blind community isn't my target audience because, I mean, the sighted market tends to be bigger, so to speak. But things like the above give one pause for sure.

No thank you. Even turnover was more credible. Fyi it's easy to find if you look for long enough that even some of the OG jaws devs said that it will be virtually impossible to dev a screen reader for macos way back then.
And why base it on jaws while nvda is wide open to inspect so one can get a theoretical idea of how a screen reader general components should interface with specific elements of the OS?
Fun how linux desktop is actually open but no vibe code screen reader is being attempted there but within a month we've got two now, and I can at least respect turnover.
Fun, an llm would happily say hey what keyboard schemas do you want? While this should be among the last steps when making any screen reader like app. Like it's the shortcuts that are the bigger problem with voiceover, well spoiler alert we can customize almost evrything now. But who wants to rewrite or overide some a11y closed apis? As this is what would be ultimately needed for the mac. I honestly wonder though with one of latest apple paper about this comuter vision model about UI detection for app intents if attempting the off screen model trend again could go somewhere, a question for you @choom and other knowledgeable developers out there.
See? This is the kind of words / questions we should see in such threads, a 15-20% people who are developers and or at least can ask the right questions and other who know the technicalities and security risk of beta testing such a product. The "I use jaws and I'd want something similar on the mac" doesn't help anybody.
Just as a side note, I have theorized with gemini a couple days ago if I'd need to go and read / understand how to navigate in chromium full source code to get the accessibility tree of any page so maybe one can build a screen reader agnostic accessibility view, not at the os accessibility level but directly from what any dev can see in the console, and then it mentiones headless browsers and how chromium or similar can natively give the json of a given page. Then we would of course have the problem of the anti bot and anti scrapers, how to actually give real hardware profiles to mitigate that, and so on.
Of course I am just a student currently and centering a react div gives me a headache so this is way way above my knowledge, but this is at least the kind of technical discussions we should have whenever such topic is discussed.
Edit: I don't remember what was different in the 9 other drafts :)

Please do let me know what I can offer of help. I use Mac everyday for text editing, media consumption and browsing.

i'm sorry, but why is it that after ternover was made, other people are trying to hop onto the bandwaggon.
ternover is better imo then what this would be, and i hav pretty bad issues with to

As I said previously, this thread comes right on the heels of Turnover, which is still featured on the front page at the time of this comment. If the author wanted to gage interest, all they would have to do would be read the Turnover thread and then start their own thread with at least a teaser video and an explanation of what makes this screen-reader, which by the way doesn't even have a name, different or better than the alternatives. As it stands, it sounds like the original poster, who hasn't even replied to anyone on the thread yet, isn't really taking this seriously, so to me this is a joke until proven otherwise.

It's impossible! Talking out his butt.

Also, moderately suspicious....

*Clears throat* Will it be open source?