Blind Specific Programs or Not

[Chris Hofstader]

Philosophically, making mainstream devices accessible through a separate
user agent is, in my opinion, far preferred to "Blind Guy Ghetto" products.
With something like UPNP and V2 in the future, one can create an infinite
series of user agents to fit every imaginable need without turning the
original device into a Rube Goldberg machine. 

Imagine a thermostat that is perfectly usable by a blind person, a deaf
person, Stephen Hawking, a textually impaired person a low vision person,
someone with dexterity problems, etc. You would end up with a monster. If,
on the other hand, a single thermostat was to have some form of wireless
communication that exposed a UPNP protocol, a blind person could access it
from a PAC Mate, laptop or something else on their home network. The low
vision guy could run magnification on a tablet PC and achieve the same
result. The thermostat manufacturer can add a $6 part and a little software
(write it in India for cheap) and sell a million units with near universal
accessibility to the product.

Custom applications for blind people do have their place. No screen reader
has ever come close to delivering a graphing calculator as good as Gardner's
and no one has ever been quite as able to deliver arithmetic to blind kids
as well as Ted Henter's new project. For the most part, though, the
economies of scale tell me that the iPaq that sells millions of units per
year is going to be profoundly less expensive than a PAC Mate which sells a
thousand a month or so.

I'm doing a lot of research on environmental accessibility (it's one of the
primary reasons I left FS) and hope to see much of this showing up in hotels
and assistive living centers in the next couple of years. I believe that all
of the new work we'll be doing on this stuff will be covered by GPL but will
be developed under GNU/Linux as well as a few flavors of Windows.