Re: Leasey has been released! Every JAWS user should have Leasey!
Respectfully, I disagree.
This isn't saying that it provides me with functionality I didn't have before or couldn't get before, nor is it saying that it makes applications that weren't accessible become so. It is saying that it makes computers easier to use for the new blind user, with a pretty heavily implied emphasis on not actually having to learn.
What happens here is that you teach the user to rely on a system that is narrow. Nothing outside the system will be looked at because it is too much trouble. You might get more blind people on the computer, but you intrinsically limit what they can do to whatever tasks you're specifically wrapping. No one will look further for exactly the same reasons that this kind of software exists in the first place: in general, people don't want to actually learn things with expected gratification at some point in the future but requiring only work now until such time as the perceiv
ed value (not the objective value, and I think this distinction is important) is great enough. I don't rate this as particularly important in the grand scheme of making things accessible: it makes the stereotypical call center employee's life potentially easier, possibly makes the lives of some beginner to intermediate users easier with the possible (I'd say likely) cost that they never finish the transition to advanced, and has no impact on people who actually know the computer really well. I'm not claiming that we should all be like our sighted peers, but in the long run this is yet another piece of software that could be replaced by a "here's a list of things that are known to be accessible" page, at least for the user who actually knows the screen reader-in at least this way, the objection I have is the same as that which I have for VIPMud.
The world we have now, or at least the world that this software claims to fix, exists be
cause of basically everything in the other thread about schools for the blind. Nearly every organization that trains blind people wishes to prepare you for one specific, narrow job. To that end, we replace understanding with rote memorization of keystrokes and steps, creating a market for this kind of software. The blind people who leaves these programs know the minimum for one job and maybe a little bit extra, were never shown that there's a whole world of things you can do only because of technology, and will cling to this little tiny island. The rest of us are on the continent of understanding by comparison, but the people on the island aren't going to believe in the concept of the boat. It's kind of like those stories about people who have never experienced things that most of us consider necessities, and thus never want them-but in this case it would be pretty easy to argue that it's not a luxury after all.
Back in the day,
Freedom Scientific had a great business plan. They'd find broken software and fix it by whatever method they could, which usually meant writing custom scripts. Since then, we have gained accessibility standards and APIs, standardized on some common GUI frameworks, and the world of software has become 100 times larger. Yet this clearly unscalable solution exists and is still pretty standard. I strongly believe that this is because we ourselves perpetuate this mentality of "if blind people really need it, one of those SR devs or someone will fix it." But suppose that we could do two things: First, get blind people to actually understand the computer enough for it to be abundantly clear to naive sighted people that computers and accessible software help blind people. Second, convince sighted people to start fixing their broken stuff and not assuming it's the job of someone like Freedom Scientific or Leasey. Then we'd h
ave an actually accessible world, not this world with a set of mutually exclusive giant bandaid software packages in which your expertise don't transfer because you learned to perform the task on a screen reader specific app. Furthermore, the viewpoint would perpetuate at least to some extent, causing a much longer term improvement-I'd be willing to bet that Leasey does not make it 10 years or probably even 5, not unless they've got a large source of funding from somewhere and Jaws suddenly stops looking like it's going to be killed from the outside soon.
And finally, the mentality of "I shouldn't be like my sighted peer" is dangerous. I'm not saying you're saying this, but i'm not sure how to articulate what you are saying in anything less than a paragraph. But while it is true that we can't always be like sighted people and still be efficient, it is true that at least knowing how a sighted person does it
eases communication with a sighted person by an order of magnitude. One of my most useful skills is my ability to translate instructions aimed at the sighted into something I can do myself. Perhaps we can be more efficient in some cases by working in our own UI paradigm, but being at least somewhat comparable to a sighted person is really important in a lot of ways. I don't see how Leasey does this, either.
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