Hello! This week I thought I’d try something different, and bring you five different articles on screen readers. Let me know if you enjoy #WeekOfScreenReader and whether you’d like some more themed digests like this!
What better place to start than with a nice, digestible history of screen readers? Here’s your first daily frequent11y newsletter:
A Brief History of Screen Readers
- The first screen reader (for DOS) was created in 1986 by IBM Researcher and Accessibility Pioneer, Jim Thatcher. IBM Screen Reader/2 was developed to work with Windows 95 and IBM OS/2. To this day, Jim’s family sponsors the annual Jim Thatcher Prize, awarded to individuals who technically advance tools that improve access and increase participation for people with disabilities.
- Since 2009, WebAIM has surveyed screen reader users every year to monitor their preferences. The 2019 results show that NVDA, Jaws and VoiceOver are the most used on desktop/laptop, and VoiceOver on mobile.
- The article – as the title suggests – is brief, and jumps straight to present day screen readers, with a one line summary of their histories:
- JAWS (Job Access With Speech) was developed by Freedom Scientific, for DOS and then Windows.
- NVDA (Nonvisual Desktop Access) was first released in 2006.
- Given VoiceOver’s popularity, the article offers frustratingly little by way of its history. So for completion, here are my conclusions from a quick search: VoiceOver first appeared in OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in 2005. It was then added to the iPod Shuffle – which had no screen – to read out song titles, and was intended to be used by all rather than marketed as an accessibility feature. It was first added to iOS with the release of the (third generation) iPhone 3GS in 2009.
- Other screen readers are mentioned in passing too; I’ve added quick notes for some of these. Microsoft’s Narrator (built into Windows 2000 and above), Linux’s Orca (released in 2006 by Sun Microsystems – now Oracle), Android’s TalkBack and ChromeOS’s ChromeVox.
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