Re: Why do so many blindies bash android?
Ehh, from everything I've read since my last post it seems to me that the playing field is still pretty much the same. Accessibility is such a relative term that means a ton of stuff to different people, so for the time being, I'll stick to iOS. Call me lazy; you would probably be right on that front. I refuse to be seen as some stupid lousy ignoramus, however, just because I'm not willing to brush up on the technological side to be on par with Android wizzes, and if that really is how the community of the average Android user would look at me, I'd say I'd be less willing to make any switches in the forseeable future.
Honestly, this was a lot of the beaf I had with iOS users back in 2009-2010, acting as if touchscreens had no learning curb and blindy blinktarded whatevers just had to deal with it and get on the boat yesterday. It seems that the shift now, at least to some degree, is this position that if you aren't willing to find fancy ways to use a device your oppinion is not worth considering.
For the record, I'm not saying iOS doesn't have its eccentric elitist camp; I'm pointing to those of you who bash Android just because it isn't Apple, those who throw around that wonderful little punchline of "it just works" and think it sounds cute and catchy, those who seem to think that Apple can do no wrong on the accessibility front and so on. The coolest innovation I've seen recently, and I"d say it's really not all that recent, is 3d touch. That we can use it has more to do with Apple being master of its environment rather than because screen reading developers invented something super cool.
What does screen reader innovation actually look like? I'm sure people will all have their own personal opinions, but if you want to consider just one, I suggest looking at what both GWMicro and FreedomScientific were doing between the years 2000 and 2010, because I strongly feel that much of what happened during that time is taken for granted now. As it became obvious that the internet was the new road to communication and information much time was spent on how we should navigate webpages and other web documents and applications. To my knowledge, most of the what's new stuff today seems to revolve around fixing things that have already been there for awhile which may or may not need improvement. JFW 2019 improved on notifications in spelling errors in word, the ability to mimic the way VO speaks characters phonetically after a brief pause rather than having to go find out for yourself, a one stop link that'll hold your hand so you don't have to figure out what system you're running and what version of JAWS you need for it, audioducking for windows 10, the tab key no longer echoing, an announcement for multi line edit fields, and improvements to grade 1 braille support for other languages. NVDA is of course, still playing catch up on everything JFW pioneered, coming in with chart interaction support in MS word and powerpoint, adding new languages and more braille display support.
I hardly feel that qualifies as innovating or even exciting on either front, and the only reason I can give NVDA something of a pass on this is that, as I said above, JFW has had roughly 3 decades to NVDA's 13 years of development. If there's any takeaway from post 69, I would say it's that it showcases where we are right now in terms of equallity. In short, while accessibility may mean something different to all of us based on our expertise, the amount of time we have on our hands and the level of patience and tenacity we're willing to invest into a system, the fact still stands that, between Android and iOS, blind users can, for the most part, still use iOS almost as quickly and efficiently as sighted users without having to resort to tons of tweaks. I can't pick up my mom's galaxy and start using it willy nilly; I can grab my sister's iPhone and do pretty much whatever I want with it. I'm willing to accept things can drastically change in a matter of minutes because tech is always evolving, but at present, I see no greater convenience for Android than I have for iOS.
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