JAWS is the long-established commercial screen reader for Windows, made by Freedom Scientific, and the one named most often when people are asked which screen reader they use first. In WebAIM's most recent survey it led on that measure at 40.5%, with NVDA close behind at 37.7%, so it is the leader by a margin rather than the dominant product. Ask the question the other way and the order flips, because NVDA is the more commonly used of the two once people name everything they use. That is not a contradiction, it is two different questions, and most people answer both, since 71.6% of respondents use more than one screen reader. What settles it for testing is the pairing. JAWS with Chrome is the single most common screen reader and browser combination there is, at 24.7%, which is why it belongs in any test matrix that claims to be serious.
In practice
It behaves differently from NVDA in enough places to matter, particularly around tables, forms mode and some ARIA patterns, so a component that works in one is not guaranteed in the other. That is the practical case for testing both rather than picking a favourite, and it is why a defect report should always name which screen reader and which browser produced it.
Where your users are changes the answer. JAWS leads heavily in North America, where it was the primary screen reader for 55.5% of respondents against NVDA's 24.0%, and it trails in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A site selling into one region and testing for the other is testing the wrong thing.
It is commercial software with a licence to buy, in a home edition and a professional one, sold as annual subscriptions or perpetual licences. Prices move, so check them with the vendor rather than repeating a figure from a blog post, ours included. We do not publish one.
Why it matters
If you test with one Windows screen reader and your customers are American, this is the one they are most likely to be running. Testing only with the free alternative can miss failures that show up here. Four combinations cover roughly two thirds of the surveyed population, which makes a defensible test matrix rather than an endless one. JAWS with Chrome, NVDA with Chrome, JAWS with Edge, NVDA with Firefox.
Which measure a share figure means
Primary use puts JAWS first at 40.5% against NVDA's 37.7%. Commonly used puts NVDA first at 65.6% against JAWS at 60.5%. Both come from the same survey of the same 1,539 people, and any sentence about screen reader market share that does not say which measure it means is telling you very little.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- NVDANVDA is a free, open-source screen reader for Windows, made by NV Access, and more people reach for it than for anything else.
- VoiceOverVoiceOver is Apple's screen reader, built into every Mac, iPhone and iPad, and into the Apple Watch, Apple TV and Vision Pro as well.
- NarratorNarrator is Microsoft's screen reader, and what matters about it is the shape of its use rather than its feature list.
- Screen readerA screen reader is software that reads the screen out loud, or sends it to a braille display, for people who cannot see it.
- Assistive technologyAssistive technology is hardware or software that gives a person with a disability more than a mainstream browser offers on its own.
- Browse modeBrowse mode is the state a Windows screen reader sits in while somebody reads your page, and forms mode is the state it switches into when they type.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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