[akavi]

What does lynx have to do with anything? No blind person I know browses the internet without JS, and every major screen reader supports it.

[mwcampbell]

You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.

[VBprogrammer]

I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?

[dbjorge]

The most popular FOSS screen reader by a very, very large margin is NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org). It is Windows specific, though.

[mwcampbell]

There's also the Orca screen reader for GNOME. And I believe TalkBack for Android and ChromeVox for Chrome OS are both open source.

If you don't care so much about open source, as I said elsewhere on the thread, Mac has VoiceOver built in (Command+F5 to enable), and Windows has Narrator (Control+Windows+Enter to enable on recent versions).

Disclosure: I'm a dev on the Narrator team at Microsoft, but I'm posting on my own behalf here.

[mch82]

@Zeldman tweeted this screen reader survey, which includes free/non-free options plus lots of usage data... https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/

Edit: source tweet is https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1180100942131277824