Re: Honest discussion, why pay for and use jaws over free screen readers?
@38, it's funny, because I asked Rajesh Jha, the executive vice-president of experiences and devices at Microsoft that exact same question: why they didn't acquire Freedom Scientific to then have all those highly qualified accessibility engineers and why they were putting their money on narrator instead. Although I don't think it's confidential, I'm not sure I'm allowed to say everything he answered me because it was kind of a private Q&A, but I wasn't really satisfied with his answer anyway, he definitely has a lot of work to do and discussions about a whole ton of subjects that I didn't expect him to have the answer, but basically, I'd say it has to do with security and the mirror driver thing. He told me something interesting though. I asked him why accessibility, why were they investing so much in accessibility. He told me that sometimes, they do an accessibility feature that turns out to be a feature sighted people like too. He gave the example of speech synthesis reading incoming messages/e-mails, he said it turned out be be super useful for drivers in cars because they could hear their messages without having to look at the screen. Now obviously, it's kind of a nice answer, but it's one way he looks at it.
However, I also went to Microsoft's accessibility summit and I think it was open to everybody so I guess there is no secret here. I asked the guy in charge of narrator your same question after a talk on narrator's new features. He told me that they were aiming a lot towards multiplatform, they were already showcasing narrator on Xbox, so obviously you couldn't port jaws to Xbox, it would be a nightmare. I then asked him if they were collaborating with jaws even though they were working on their own screen-reader and he told me "we are collaborating very closely, very closely.".
In the end, and this is my own opinion, it's a question of visibility (no pun intended) and money. It's expensive to do an acquisition and the upper management have other stuff to do. They care about accessibility, they really do, whether it's for complyance or empathy, although I'd say it's probably a bit more of the latter because of a ton of reasons. However, a company has to make money, I mean shareholders always want the famous double digit growth. While I'd personally love to see Micrrosoft acquire Freedom Scientific must it only be to get those awesome engineers, I'd probably not do it if I were the CEO, because it does not make a lot of sense money-wise.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
