First Hand Interview with a user of JAWS

I have gained an Interview with a first hand user of JAWS. The person whom the comments come from, is a female who is almost 100% blind in both eyes.
This is her feedback on JAWS:

"Jaws is a fantastic piece of software but, it can be very confusing learning all of the shortcut keys.  The problem with Jaws when using it on a website is that you don't know how the page has been configured, so you don't know what to look for first.  Do you start with the headers? or the links? The problem is that you can only look for one thing at a time which if you could see would not be the case as you can skim read the page making it quicker.

It can be very frustrating and it can take ages to try and do anything and most of the time I end up not using Jaws on my PC to look on the internet due to the problems you face, I tend to use the iphone or ipod as they have a built in voice over software which reads out everything you touch on the screen.  This process is more like being able to see what is on the page and you don't have to remember all of the right shortcut keys.

The other problem with Jaws is the expense as it costs nearly £1,000 for the software and then you also need to purchase training as it is not a piece of software you can just pick up and use it has taken me about 7 months to learn Jaws so far and I am no where near an expert!!!

On a final note Jaws can be very annoying as the voice isn't exactly great, it is very robotic and doesn't always announce things correctly which can be very confusing especially when trying to know if you have spelt something correctly.  I have found I have slowly got used to the voice but it really drives everyone else mad especially my colleagues in the office.  The one thing is you are never lonely and always have someone to talk to !!!"