[steerpike]

Most accessibility shops and devs tend to use the free NVDA screenreader[0] for accessibility testing because of the costs associated with JAWS. There are differences between the two (and the other well used screenreader VoiceOver) but NVDA is a damn good product with a decent user base that certainly helps in finding potential hiccups in complex frontend applications. Usually this happens when one of the screenreaders hits something on a webpage that triggers 'interaction mode'[1]

Edit: Interestingly the most recent data I found[2] seems to indicate that NVDA has passed JAWS as the most used screenreader, so might be worth using as the default for testing

[0] https://www.nvaccess.org/about-nvda/ [1] https://tink.uk/understanding-screen-reader-interaction-mode... [2] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/

[mwcampbell]

The Narrator screen reader built into Windows is also not bad these days, with recent versions of Windows 10. You can turn it on with Ctrl+Win+Enter. And while I'm here, if you're on a Mac, you can turn on VoiceOver with Command+F5. Both Narrator and VoiceOver have built-in tutorials.

Disclosure: I was a developer on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft for a little over 3 years, focusing on Narrator.

[paranorman]

This lines up with my experience working on product features for customers that have accessibility requirements. From what I’ve seen, most larger companies that care about accessibility (usually for fear of lawsuits) have internal folks testing with NVDA specifically. This is another great reason to use it for your testing because you can be confident the odds of someone checking your work with NVDA are good.