As a linux user I do most of my assistive technology testing with Orcas. Do you have any insight into that? Do many assistive technology users use Orcas? Is Orcas behavior significantly different from the more popular once?

In the last WebAIM Screen Reader survey [0], if anyone answered they primarily use Orca, they got lumped into "Other"; out of over 1,000 respondents, 7 primarily use Chromevox so the Orca number must be lower than that. If some use Orca sometimes, they must have been less than 1% of the respondents and got lumped into Other for that question as well.

That doesn't mean that Orca doesn't do a good job or that it works very differently than other screen readers. The A11ySupport site [1] does have some data on Orca's support for specific code. For instance, it fully supports the aria-expanded attribute but has no support for description list elements.

If you have an iOS or Android device, using their built-in screen readers might be more instructive.

[0] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/ [1] https://a11ysupport.io/

No, I wish I had insight here but I don't. I'm sorry I can't be any more help.

> you want to at least test with JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver

It depends on what the stakes are but if you’re consistently confirming things work with just one screen reader, that makes most of the difference.

NVDA with Firefox or Chrome is probably the best to test with; it’s free, probably the most common choice now, and it has a lot in common with JAWS. But if testing with Windows is inconvenient, testing VoiceOver with Safari for Mac is still very useful, in part because it’s very similar to VoiceOver on iOS.

Thanks for the tips. I'll check those out.