I got this from another list and found it quite fascinating. I thought you
would too.
The Death Of Screen Reader Innovation
July 20, 2013 by Chris Hofstader.
On the Monday of Thanksgiving week 2004, I walked into my St. Petersburg
office for the last time as a Freedom Scientific employee. I had, at that
point, been at the helm of the FS software engineering department for six
years but, as Lee Hamilton, then CEO of Freedom Scientific told me that day,
I was, “no longer capable of managing the team.” He was right, I had burned
out very badly and was in terrible physical and mental shape. My repetitive
strain injuries (RSI) caused me constant pain and the Vicodin prescribed by
my physician had too many cognitive side effects to permit me from having a
clear enough mind to perform my tasks while the steroidal injections I
received for the same injuries had intense emotional side effects that felt
like I was on cocaine or methamphetimine.
While my final few months at Freedom Scientific were a personal disaster for
me and not too good for FS or its customers, I am very proud of the many
things we accomplished during my six year tenure. During that time, Eric
Damery, Glen Gordon and I invented a ton of new screen reader features now
seen in all such utilities on Windows.
What Did We Accomplish?
In my time at FS, six years ending in November 2004, our little team
released versions of JAWS beginning with 2.51 (a minimal update to fix an
authorization problem in the 40 minute demo) to JAWS 3.31, the first screen
reader to add what is now the essential virtual buffer on the Internet in
all screen readers to JAWS 6 the last JAWS in which I participated. In those
release we added new and interesting features with each revision and pushed
the user interface of screen readers forward every six months or so.
In that period at Freedom Scientific we:
Invented the virtual buffer concept for delivering web information to JAWS
users.
Invented the idea of querying applications through a private interface to
gather and present information to our users – a concept used today in JAWS,
Window-Eyes, NVDA, System Access and Orca screen readers.
Provided the first ever ways of reading charts and graphs in a major screen
reader.
Advanced usability of office suites in a way never previously seen in a
screen reader.
Invented the now ubiquitous “QUick Keys” style of navigating web pages more
efficiently.
Added the JAWS “Speech and Sounds Manager” for adding tonal augmentations to
information, thus, expanding the number of simultaneous semantic dimensions
enjoyed by users.
Added features to “intelligently” skip beyond repeated information on web
pages.
Added features to recognize similar documents and spreadsheets and
automatically apply a set of adjustments for reading the data.
And many more innovations in screen reading user interfaces that you can
find by looking up the “What’s New” sections of the release notes for these
JAWS releases..
Returning To Windows
I hadn’t used a Windows computer or a Windows screen reader in more than
five years but, recently have found that VoiceOver on Macintosh can’t
provide the level of support I need so, I downloaded and installed VMWare
Fusion, Windows 7 and NVDA. Once everything was up and running, I started
exploring this terrific free screen reader.
The first thing I noticed was that NVDA has adopted many of the ideas that
we invented in JAWS. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that,
thankfully, most of our innovations happened before FS became crazy about
patent applications and aggressive lawsuits so our most important ideas seem
to have made it to other screen readers and it’s nice to see my work so
widely accepted in virtually all Windows screen readers and in Orca on the
GNU/Linux platform.
I continued to read the NVDA documentation to see what new and noteworthy
concepts have been invented in the nine years since I walked out of Freedom
Scientific on that November morning. The first thing I found was a gesture
based navigation system, a notion first introduced by Apple in VoiceOver for
iOS and adopted by NVDA first and, based on statements made at CSUN this
year, will be added to JAWS this autumn. I looked further and found nothing
new. I read up on JAWS, once the hands down leader in innovation and found
nothing new there in many years either.
So, in a decade, the only new ideas in screen readers have come not from a
small, highly focused screen reader company but, rather, from a mainstream
super power. Ted Henter’s prediction that big mainstream companies making
screen readers would result in a failure to innovate seems to be partially
true, Apple innovated at first but has allowed the OSX version of VoiceOver
to deteriorate and they haven’t expanded on really good ideas that are
present but incomplete but, contrary to his prediction, the smaller,
blindness specific companies have done nothing new or interesting in years
either.
Was I That Important?
At Henter-Joyce and, after our merger, Freedom Scientific, the best ideas
came out of a collaboration mostly between me, Eric Damery, Glen Gordon and
Joseph Stephen. Some of these ideas started as hallway conversations with
other employees, phone conversations with beta testers, questions from our
technical support staff and lots of other sources. I was usually the person
who wrote up the ideas into a formal specification (FS product managers seem
to have some kind of innate aversion to writing anything down) and,
sometimes, I originated the notion but, by the time it became a task to add
it to JAWS, the concept would have been thoroughly reviewed multiple times
by Eric, Glen, Joe and, often, Ted Henter.
Eric, Glen, Joe and lots of other smart and interesting JAWS users (yes,
although sighted, Eric can use JAWS with any power users out there) remain
at FS. I don’t think they lost all of their creativity and ability to come
up with new and valuable features for JAWS so what has gone wrong in the
screen reader business?
Leaders Who Are Blind
As far as I can tell, other than Mike Calvo, CEO of Serotek, makers of the
System Access screen reader, I was the last blind person with direct
authority over a commercial screen reader and, as System Access has never
had a large user base, the last blind person with direct authority over a
widely used commercial screen reader. System Access, in its hey day was a
pretty innovative screen reader and Mike’s influence as a user advanced
features like their “See Saw” global “dictionary” for web sites, the end of
“Forms mode” (something Glen and I invented that wasn’t the greatest idea),
the first ever “virtual” screen reader and a variety of other excellent
concepts. I’ll contend that these happened in SA because it is a project led
by a blind user of the software.
Reexamining how we invented things at Freedom Scientific, I recall that,
often, the best ideas came out of frustration. Joe Stephen wanted to read
notes in braille different from the contents of PowerPoint slides so we
added the ability to have one stream of information go to the speech
synthesizer while another went to the braille display. I got sick of making
all of the JAWS settings just to read the FS financials on a weekly basis so
we invented a way that JAWS could recognize different but similar
spreadsheets and automatically apply the settings. We invented Quick Keys
while Glen and I talked on the phone about single letter navigation in some
emacs scripts. Most of our best ideas grew out of desires by actual users in
our employ.
Why Doesn’t NVDA Take The Lead?
NVDA is an excellent free, no cost screen reader for Windows. As far as I
know, all of its code is written by blind people who use the software as
their primary means of interacting with Windows computers. Why, then, don’t
they innovate?
NVDA, as far as I can tell, is written almost entirely by two guys. These
guys are really smart and creative fellows and were the first to bring
gesture navigation to Windows for screen reader users, a concept, while not
novel, that is both powerful and useful. Nonetheless, it is a large and
complicated bit of software that requires all of the maintenance of JAWS
without anything approaching the FS ability to invest in a project.
Screen Reader Funding Models
There are three major ways to fund a screen reader’s development. A large
mainstream company like Apple or Microsoft can make their own screen reader
motivated by federal and state regulations requiring accessibility as a
condition of sale. A free software screen reader like NVDA or Orca can be
funded by corporate dollars contributed to the effort, by contributions from
users and the general public and by selling services to support development.
Lastly, a commercial technology company like Freedom Scientific or GW Micro
can fund their research and development costs from sales of their products.
When I left FS in 2004, we were selling about $1.2 million worth of JAWS per
month. We were spending less than one million dollars annually to make JAWS
(including software engineering, testing, scripting, product management and
sales roll outs) and, when I ran the project, I insisted we spend some of
this money on innovation in JAWS and our other software products.
One might ask, if you made about $15 million on JAWS sales, how did Freedom
Scientific spend the money? In that final year at FS, we reported a total
profit to our investors of $6 million so where did $9 million in JAWS sales
alone go?
The answer is simple, Lee Hamilton (then FS CEO) and the FS board of
directors saw blindness and low vision hardware as their future and invested
heavily in the hardware division while allowing JAWS to stagnate. The
authors and publishers of the then world’s leading screen reader milked its
sales dollars to try to expand their business with products like PAC Mate,
Focus and a whole pile of digital magnifiers. So, for all intents and
purposes, new JAWS sales and SMA dollars were spent not on the screen reader
but, rather, incredibly high margin hardware devices – an outcome not
terribly good for JAWS users.
At the time I left FS, it cost the company about $400 to manufacture,
package and ship a PAC Mate BX 440 (then a fast processor and a 40 cell
display) and we would sell them for about $5000. JAWS, on the other hand,
sold for about $900 so, the most we could make on the software was limited
by its price while we could enjoy $4600 of pure profit on each PM sold.
Today, I’m told that a digital magnifier costs a tiny amount in parts and
manufacturing but they also sell with windfall level profits.
For its business, taking the lucrative JAWS as a funding source for hardware
made a lot of sense. It did nothing for the companies customers though.
The Fight
I have always been one who fights for what he thinks is right. While at
Freedom Scientific, I had huge arguments with our CEO over whether or not we
should invest in a wide variety of different ideas. I lost most of these
battles but had my share of wins and I’m proud of the work we did with JAWS,
OpenBook, MAGic and our other software projects back then. At the same time,
I can only think that what stopped innovation at FS may be the lack of
“fight” in those I left behind.
More so than anyone else at FS other than me, Eric Damery has always been
the guy to push hard for new features that can improve the experience for
JAWS users. Meanwhile, Eric is bound by the toughest non-compete agreement
in the business and a salary that would be impossible for him to get in any
other field. Eric is bound by contract and golden handcuffs from doing
anything too bold. I was stupid, I thought I could leave Fs and continue in
accessibility but, over my first two years out of FS, they threatened me
with legal action nine separate times and I serve as an example for any
other FS executive who may consider moving on.
Glen Gordon, one of the smartest and most creative software developers with
whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of working, is the FS chief technical
officer who had it really easy when Ted Henter ran the company. When Ted was
around, we merely had to pitch a good idea and Ted, a user himself, would
embrace it and we could go off and do the implementation. After the merger,
Glen retreated and would ask me to fight the good fight, a role that
ultimately destroyed my career at the company.
Joseph Stephen, Rob Gallo and some others with a high level of creativity
are in positions too junior to have access to the executive committee and
others in decision making positions. Hence, without Eric or one of the
blinks in the executive suite fighting for an idea, something my sighted
replacement hasn’t (according to reports I get from friends who remain
inside FS) even once.
So, while the ideas weren’t mine exclusively, my role at FS led both the
advancement of JAWS and that of screen readers from our competitors. Without
JAWS leading, I doubt any Windows screen reader ever will again unless
Microsoft decides to either license NVDA or make a truly usable Narrator.
What Did Users Miss?
I cannot speak to any ideas discussed within Freedom Scientific after I left
the company in November 2004. I suspect Glen and Eric presented a bunch of
good ideas that have been ignored. I can, however, speak to the projects I
had going at FS that were canceled upon my departure. I’m not sure all of
these were good ideas but, compared to what FS has done since, they were
certainly bold, creative and, perhaps useful. As these notions never saw a
commercial release, we cannot know the actual impact they may have had if
they fell into the hands of users in the wild.
The projects they killed were:
JAWS for Macintosh was requested of us by the third party development people
at Apple. I had formed a relationship with the people at Apple and, when
they asked us to propose doing a Macintosh version of JAWS, I pitched the
idea at an executive staff meeting and was nearly laughed out the door. In
the latest marketshare figures I could find, VoiceOver and NVDA are the only
two screen readers showing growth. Could we have made something better than
VoiceOver? I think so.
JAWS on mainstream Windows Mobile devices was not just possible but
something we already had running on both iPaq and the Dell Axim. Lee
Hamilton said that such would compete with PAC Mate and, instead of allowing
JAWS to grow with mainstream hardware, FS insisted on forcing its blind
users into the ghetto with a massively more expensive hardware device with
all of the social grace of a brick. Our friends at Code Factory did make
this into a reality but with their minimal ability to market their products,
uptake was slow and, as the accessibility of the Windows Mobile platform
ecosystem decayed, their screen reader died on the vine.
We had started a project into making JAWS for Symbian cell phones. While
today, years after the death of Nokia’s OS, this seemed like a bad idea,
then, with Nokia on top of the world, we could have produced and sold a
killer screen reader on more mainstream hardware. Again, the Code Factory
team and my late friend Torsten Brandt, with his Talx screen reader (sadly,
I could not find online references to either my late friend or his software
to add as a link) got their first and provided excellent access for a whole
lot of years.
We had a blind mathematician and screen reader power user designing a 3D
interface for a tool for reading and writing math. Ted Henter had already
started HenterMath and was doing some really interesting things with user
interface for blind people who wanted to manipulate equations but he was
also based in JAWS as it was, a unidimensional approach to the information.
I thought we could do something really great with math for our users but,
within a week or two of my departure, the project was killed. Blind people,
meanwhile, have no good math tool to this day.
We had my friend Will Pearson on the payroll as a contractor working on a
“machine vision” approach to screen reading. At the same time, we had a
terrific gal, an awesome hacker with a solid computer science background
working toward a rectangular approach to a screen reader interface.
Combining these two concepts, we could have provided a layout similar to one
with vision would see. We could have used positional information to better
increase reading efficiency while also presenting the semantic information
that comes from a visual layout – ideas that, to my knowledge, have only
otherwise been explored by researchers in labs.
Where Did FS Invest In JAWS?
On the day I left FS, my friend and terrific young hacker, Waishan Lau was
leading the cell phone screen reader project. Within a week of my departure,
her project had been canceled and she was put back onto her previous task,
namely, JAWS authorization. Waishan, now working in California at a health
informatics business in Palo Alto, is one of the hottest hackers with whom I’ve
ever worked. She is a brilliant and beautiful young woman who can code rings
around most others in or out of FS. Her terrific talents were used almost
exclusively on copy protection – a feature that no user actually enjoys.
Freedom Scientific does continue to invest in JAWS. Their advancements,
though, are minimal. They support the latest and greatest MS operating
systems, they try to support the most recent versions of Microsoft Office
and, now and then, they add a new feature that will be mostly ignored by the
user base. FS is happy making its annual release and taking the SMA dollars
from its users whether or not they add anything of any actual value to those
users. Supporting the latest OS may not be easy but it’s something that no
other software companies charge for.
So, Maybe I Was Important
For years, I thought my years at Freedom Scientific had ended in failure. I
couldn’t, due to health problems, continue to lead that team any longer. I
still had the odd good idea but constant chronic pain while unable to sleep
from the steroids drove me into a very bad place. Fighting every step of the
way for innovation in JAWS and our other products nearly killed me.
Looking back, though, on the accomplishments we made, the major strides in
screen reader user interface and the tremendous improvements we made in the
lives of JAWS users in the workplace, I’m reminded that we did a lot of good
stuff.
Perhaps, our success relied on the odd combination of actors in our story.
Eric Damery’s undying commitment to our users, Glen Gordon’s software
engineering genius telling us what was possible, Joseph Stephen adding ideas
to JAWS application support while we were asleep and my creativity mixed
with my insanity, a crazy that says that we can do incredible things in
spite of having to fight within the company to do so that led to those great
years in screen reader development. I don’t know why it worked so well for
us in those days but I will state that I believe it had more to do with
having a blind person in charge of the product than any of our individual
contributions.
I made a huge difference at FS because, in spite of having to fight so much
to get anything interesting done in the post merger era, I was willing, no
matter how much pain I experienced, no matter how personally painful it was
to see great ideas and support for mainstream hardware killed, I kept
fighting until my last day. Without such an advocate within the company, I
can’t see innovation happening again until a major screen reader is once
again led by a user.
Get paid to drink coffee. Check it out at
www.sozolife.com/nancylynn
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
