[detaro]

In addition, I wish screenreaders had a text mode, where they print what they say and maybe provide cues on possible actions. Actual screenreader users work with astonishing speaking speeds and great memorization of commands, but without the experience a bare-bones but more visual interface would likely be easier to use.

[epikur]

They do! Not fully optimized for developers perhaps, but check out "Speech Viewer" in NVDA and the "Braille Viewer" and "Speech History" in JAWS. This guide has some screenshots:

https://www.accessibility-developer-guide.com/setup/screen-r...

[mwcampbell]

Also Narrator's developer mode, which you can toggle with Control+Narrator+F12 (where the "Narrator" key is either Caps Lock or Insert).

Disclosure: I used to work on the Narrator team at Microsoft.

[SpaceL10n]

And, in addition to those JAWS tools, there is also JAWS Inspect (https://www.paciellogroup.com/products/jaws-inspect/)

[jscholes]

> In addition, I wish screenreaders had a text mode, where they print what they say and maybe provide cues on possible actions.

NVDA, mentioned prominently in the article as a free and open source screen reader, has a floating-window-style speech viewer. I sometimes use it when demonstrating a screen reader user's experience of a particular component when asked to share my audio, because slowing down the screen reader to a rate that everyone on the call will understand will also make the meeting much longer.

JAWS also has a speech history viewer, and there are keystrokes to dump VoiceOver speech as text and audio files.

[pabs3]

BTW, NVDA are hiring (in Australia) at the moment:

https://www.nvaccess.org/category/careers/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639590