I cannot say anything for sure yet because I am just getting the experience myself, but for now, just know that I have been doing some comparative reesearch to figure out which screen reader is best for a blind Windows Admin in the increasingly high-tech IT world. I have been looking right now at two screen readers; JAWS for Windows 12.0 (one version earlier than Freedom Scientific's currently released version 13), and Window-Eyes, from GWMicro. I have seen some crutial enhancements in the latter which the former lacks, most of these in the category of application stability on a general scale. Yet it is very difficult to decide between the two in certain criteria since they have their strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages. But what I am most concerned with right now are the uncommon, administrator-only applications most commonly used in corporate environments today such as virtualization technologies, and most other server-side products such as Sharepoint Server 2010, MS SQL Server 2008 R2/2012 (I haven't tried the third CTP since I would rather wait till the final release), and Office 2010.
I have discovered that in terms of most of the above, Window-Eyes is much more stable, in some cases reading more than what I get with JAWS, and at other times, simply reading an equal amount of information. The big kicker here though, at least I think, is that with Window-Eyes, one can write their own scripts for any particular application that does not have default support for the screen reader in any programming language including those supported by the .Net Framework. JAWS allows for this as well, but only for scripts written in a propriotary language that is hard to learn, examples are limited and often silly and unrealistic, and it cannot use Windows .net framework classes or Win32 APIs in the scripts, making for very limited support of anything that falls a bit far from the mark of normal programming practices. And UIA, you ask? Well don't. Because the use of WPF is not one of the strong suits of JAWS for Windows. In terms of working with virtualization technologies, I have been experimenting a bit with VMware vSphere, yet I haven't gotten Window-Eyes to show a single console to a single VM. I will be asking the GWMicro community about this since the support staff tell me that they have seen it happen and I do not doubt it in the least since they are very aware of the needs of our community that come with changing technology. I have not gotten to test out either MSsQL Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010, or microsoft office Access 2010 yet, but I will keep you updated in future blog posts in this series.