New Linux PDA For Blind People

[W. Nick Dotson]

First, your grasp of economics is flawed, unless you insist on clinging to 60's style failed NeoMarxcist paradigms.  Next, 
your decimal place with respect to the number of visually impaired people in the US is one place too far to the left, or 
your memory and imagination has moved it there.  The Apple Screen Reader is a primitive sop to keep school bids 
coming in, and still like any other screen reader, dependent upon the willingness of application programmers and 
marketroids to program in a manner acceptable to the standards being used for access by the screen reader.

Most visually impaired people, those with any residual vision cling to the use of that vision no matter how impaired it's 
functionality is, and cringe from the necessity to learn to access information with a divergent sensory modality from the 
one they think of as "normal" and "bespeaking being a "normal" person).

And, your idea of JFW shipping with Windows, would stifle progress in screen reader development.  If you want imposed 
constraints on development, and price controls, I suggest you immigrate to a country with such a system then, see how 
happy you are with restricted choice.  I for one don't want any part of your cossetted Nannie State, and restricted 
market society.

Nick


On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:06:20 -0500, Lorenzo Taylor wrote:

 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
 Hash: SHA1

 Competitive pricing with mainstream devices is in fact possible.  Last I
 read, only about a week ago, there are around 35 million blind and
 visually impaired people just in the United States.  And there are much
 more around the world.  The reason that only tens of thousands of
 assistive devices are sold is because the price is too high for
 34,950,000 people to be able to afford to buy them.  Secondly, it is
 totally unnecessary to design the hardware from the ground up in most
 cases just to accomodate a relatively small group of people.  The
 hardware is not the problem most of the time.  It's the software.  And
 with all the free and open source software out there now, it is very
 easy to reprogram a mainstream device to be more than suitable, and in
 fact fun for a blind or visually impaired person to use at very little
 if any cost increase over the comparable mainstream device.

 And if it is such a challenge to make an assistive device for a disabled
 person in mass production even though mainstream hardware could be used
 for this purpose, then it is time for the mainstream device
 manufacturers to dive into the assistive technology pool and make
 software that works on the mainstream hardware that they use so that
 there is little if any increase in cost of production.  Apple did it,
 and now every Mac has a screen reader built right in, so that a visually
 impaired person pays not a penny more than a sighted person does for the
 same computer.  Yes, Microsoft should include JAWS with Windows, and
 Nokia phones should include Talx at no cost to the consumer.  It can be
 and in fact has been done with similar products, and should be done with
 all products.  As for things like braille displays, instead of about 20
 companies competing to produse 10,000 each and charging as much as a
 small car for their products, 1 or 2 companies should be producing 50 to
 100,000 units and selling them for an affordable price that a person on
 a disibility check or who works at a workshop could afford to pay and
 still buy food and pay the bills.  It may be speculation, but I think
 they would find that if the price of their device was affordable for
 everyone, many, many more people would buy it and they could mass
 produce a lot more devices at a lower cost.  Basically, the relatively
 low demand for assistive technology doesn't drive up the price.  Rather,
 the prohibitive price drives down the demand.

 Lorenzo
 - -- 
 Keep American Idol great! Vote for Mandisa!
 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
 Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

 iD8DBQFELAH8G9IpekrhBfIRAq4jAKCRcls5cS3+xmTBiN/VieV/DmBgGgCfa86e
 SspMMU5V2JnTeNLQ4z+9DXk=
 =pzu1
 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

 _______________________________________________
 Speakup mailing list
 Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
 http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup