New Linux PDA For Blind People

[Lorenzo Taylor]

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The voice in a blind-friendly mainstream product should be no problem for a
sighted person.  If they don't like it, they don't have to turn it on.  It's
that simple.  The concept I'm going with here is that a blind-friendly product
won't make a company much money.  This is the excuse given by all the companies
out there who are making tons of money off the government agencies and blind
people themselves who can make the sacrifice it takes to buy such a product.  So
why not make the mainstream product blind friendly at no cost to the consumer?
The voice could be turned off by a sighted person if he/she doesn't like it, or
better yet, it could be very easilly turned on by a blind person if he/she needs
it.  Voice synthesis is extremely cheap to implement now, so it wouldn't cost
the manufacturer any additional money to make it work, and it wouldn't reduce
the functionality of the device.

As for the open source mandate in MA, I think it's a good idea.  It's the
proprietary nature of screen readers for the unfortunately most popular OS that
makes it difficult to work with for some blind people.  The screen readers for
Windows are based on proprietary technology and for the most part only work with
proprietary technology.  This is changing slightly, but not enough.  This is what
makes blind people think the state of MA is doing a bad thing by trying to cut
costs by switching to a superior open source technology.  Just think what the
state was doing when they forced everyone to use Microsoft formats, or Microsoft
forced the state to use their formats, whichever you like.

Lorenzo
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