It has a very small but dedicated user-base. You could clone it, but you don't have a market to sell to. You can't just make a lot more blind people to grow the market. (You could, but please don't)

I work at an accessibility research centre in Toronto. When people consult Occupational Therapists for their a11y needs the government here will subsidize a percentage of the software (and hardware?) costs. As far as I know JAWS gets recommended, NVDA doesn't :/

What's the standard really depends on which slice of the world/market you're looking at. NVDA[0] is a very capable screenreader as well and does some things even better than JAWS. It's totally free and open source.

[0]: https://nvaccess.org/

That's great, but nobody uses it, so we don't target it.

For GOV.UK we came up with a screenreader breakdown of JAWS at 38.5%, VoiceOver at 21.2% and NVDA 12%. That’s not a lot, but it’s not nobody.

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-the-...

Thanks so much for sharing your results!

I bought Jaws 15 years ago before NVDA was out. Because of this it doesn't cost me $1000 to keep using it, it costs me $200 every two years to keep up to date. IT's the only software I know of that offers good 3270 emulator support using third party scripts someone wrote. While it may be possible to make NVDA behave similarly with python scripting it would take more then $200 worth of my time since I'm not a Python programmer. Since I rely on it for my job it's also comforting to know I can call up someone and get help or open a support ticket if something is broken. I have not had to do this recently, but I remember calling up when I switched from office 2003 to 2007 at work because the UI was so different I wasn't sure if I was having accessibility issues or not. Support was helpful and had me working in under 10 minutes.

> I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard.

my recollection from speaking to a blind acquaintance is that it is subsidized by some government agency for personal use, and businesses buying it for blind employees are just stuck with it as an ADA thing.

> I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard.

Of course, there's always software that costs absurd amounts of money for seemingly simple things; IDA comes to mind. I'm not excusing it, but that isn't to say that it doesn't exist.

> What is their moat

Their moat is that the addressable market is too small for investors to bother investing in.

There are 36 million blind people in the world and other tens of millions with severe impairments. It seems more like the market is too small due to lack of investment and development.