Re: GW SocialEyes: A Failure in Marketing, and a Resounding Disappointment
Putting a screen reader on the OS by default can be a disservice to the blindness community. It can also be a benefit. It's the MAC problem: Voiceover is free and "good enough", so no one can compete and enter the market. Without market competition, things stop improving in the tech world. Putting a screen reader in an OS if the company cares about the OS and screen reader combination in question is a service to the blind community, but woe is you if said company stops caring in any way. Voiceover on the Mac allows you to do things, but I will posit that a screen reader made by a company dedicated to it could do better. Voiceover on IOS is the best mobile phone screen reader, still gets updates with every major release, and probably can't be beat by anyone-not to mention that app developers and the tech world are more aware of it. I'd' say that one is definitely a bigger service than another. Neith
er of these cases are a disservice.
Consider, though. A company makes a screen reader, which takes a5 years or so to be ready for daily use for everyone. Said company updates it for another couple years. Finally, they lose interest and abandon it. It's going to fall behind now, slowly but surely, and there's no real way for any commercial screen reader to compete. Getting an NVDA for another platform isn't trivial by any means. Writing a screen reader requires someone intimately familiar with the platform and a great, great deal of time. This leaves blind people in a bad position, worsening over time, and with little hope of turning it around. 15 years down the road, the OS is barely accessible because it's moved so far away from the original screen reader. Because there was no threshold, people capable of actually making a new one either don't take notice or left the platform long ago-b
ack when it was merely annoyances to the power user, not a major commercial opportunity. The platform is now left without anything resembling good accessibility, and the chances of someone fixing it are very, very slim.
I have not seen the interview nor do I agree with being so absolute. It can be a disservice, however, it really can. It depends on the company and the situation; saying it is a service to include the screen reader with the OS is just as bad as saying that it is a disservice to do so. We don't have enough of a track record or enough of a legal basis to determine which, at least in my opinion-having good screen readers is not required by law and I don't think having any screen reader is. I'd say that this is an evolving and turbulent situation in general-it's quite possible that we'll see a law that makes it a service without question: definitions for what it must be able to do for example.
Until then, I examine this kind of thing on a case-by-case basis.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=144030#p144030
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