I know that JAWS, the most popular screen reader, uses IE6 as the underlying engine used to parse the HTML.

This probably means that it is identifying itself as IE6.

On 16:18:33 6 July 2007 SharonScott wrote:

Does anyone know how you can tell how many people visiting a website are using speech browsers?  We've had a look at the logfiles but nothing seems to show up.  Many thanks.

Thank you very much....very helpful.

On 16:09:36 11 July 2007 tpl wrote:

Kelvin's answer is only partially correct. JAWS is indeed the most widely-used screen reader, with a market share estimated to be of the order of 50%, which is 2 or 3 times that of its nearest competitor.

However, it does not use any particular browser engine. It simply interacts with whatever application has focus. Historically, Internet Explorer has always worked best with JAWS, although Firefox now works reasonably well too.

The bad news is that you cannot identify screen readers in your server logs because they 'piggy-back' on the browser and do not modify the agent string that is sent to the server.

There is a possible solution, although it is not retrospective. It is based on a method by which some screen readers can be detected using Flash. This can be used to request a file (perhaps a 1-pixel image), so you will know that all such requests in the server log will have come from screen readers. The method uses MSAA, which is supported by all the major screen readers e.g. JAWS, WindowEyes and HAL/SuperNova. There is an article at

and a search for "flash screen reader detection" should turn up more references.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/UsingFlash/help.html?content=WSd60f23110762d6b883b18f10cb1fe1af6-7c29.html