underground screenreaders

lets talk about some screenreaders, weather windows or linux, that are less herd of or common.

I wonder what was the "thunder" screen reader thing? Also I know that supernova isn't that common either but I wanna try it. The last time I tried the system access SR was back in 2022. And then I think PWWebSpeak was a web based thing that probably only works on older windows versions

Don't torture yourself with Supernova. I tried it when I was around 5 or 6, then a few years ago I did some work experience at Dolphin testing the thing and guide connect. Supernova is still as slow, buggy, hacky and crap as it was before, just with more features that barely work and memory leaks in DLLs that crash it when doing the stupidest of things. All it took for one of them to do this was sit in chrome for a bit and then alt tab away from it.

The most interesting alternative screen reader space I'd say is probably on Android, considering that a lot of them are just better than TalkBack in every way. Jieshuo comes to mind first, as well as all the recent TalkBack forks like BackTalk. On the Linux side there is Cthulhu which is a really interesting fork of Orca featuring things like accessibility for Wine apps.

honestly, I don't trust any screen reader that isn't either open source or built into the OS, because for something as vital as a screen reader that speaks all the information on the screen, including private information, I need to know that data isn't being sent somewhere

NVDA is the best free third-party screen reader on windows.