Hi Damien, Question. How many times have you called the manufacturer and actually got them to commit to improving accessibility based on your personal suggestions?
That's where the rubber meets the road for me. We can call and complain all we want, but short of a lawsuit most companies will brush us aside without a second glance. We are too much of a minority to invest time, money, and energy into developing added accessibility. >From our standpoint it is completely immoral, but it doesn't make sense from a financial point of view. Which brings me to the issue of why sighted people don't pay more attention to blindness and accessibility related issues. It comes down to out and out ignorance of what we can and can't do. The average sighted person knows nothing about screen readers like Jaws, knows nothing about applications like Openbook for scanning and reading printed documents, and probably don't know the first thing about basic cane travel. Instead they grow up in a community of roomer and wild guesses on what blindness must be like. I should know. I was once sighted. For example, when I first was told I would lose my sight you know what I thought? I believed I'd have to count steps to find my way around. I thought I'd never be able to use a computer because I couldn't use the monitor. I believed blind people got guide dogs so the dog would lead them around. I believed learning and using braille would be hard. All of these things turned out to be falsehoods, but I didn't know that at the time. In fact, no one else I knew my parents, other family members, friends, etc had any clue of what to do for a blind person, and how would they know? After all screen readers like Jaws, Window-Eyes, and Window Bridge, were sold through special agencies for the blind. Nobody knew about orientation and mobility training such as cane travel and guide dog usage so assumed a blind person must count his/her steps or a dog was trained to lead him/her around. The few samples of braille that someone would find like "other diet," which can be found on the lids of McDonald's cups, looked nothing like print so the assumption was it would be difficult to learn. I can go on and on, but what it all really boils down to is ignorance. Not ignorance that we exist, but how we actually go about using cell phones, computers, using guide dogs, cane travel, read braille materials, and all the rest of blind day to day life we take for granted. Finally, as to your point about touchscreens you are right. Not everyone can use them. There are people who have physical disabilities with their hands that would make it impossible to use a touchscreen and probably buttons as well. That's why more and more phones have voice dialing and/or voice recognition too. The iPhone, which has been said before, does have a voice recognition application called Seri. Its not very good yet, but once fully developed and tested will give an iPhone user control of the phone through voice control. So perhaps, just perhaps, that might offer a solution to your problem in time. Cheers! On 4/22/12, Damien Pendleton <dam...@blunderfield.plus.com> wrote: > Hi Mike, > There are some things we need to complain about. I'm the sort of person who > won't take things lying down. If I'm not happy with something then I will > say it. A lot of people can just grin and bear it, but to me it's that sort > of attitude that continues to prove to big arrogant snobbish money grabbers > that blind people don't care either way. For example, there's a lot of > products that don't have any accessibility features on at all that I have > also rang the manufacturers and complained about. It's funny how I'm > apparently, quite often, the only one who has mentioned it. A lot of sighted > people even admit they don't think of blind people because they don't come > across us on a day-to-day basis. Whether they come across us or not, they > still know blindness exists, therefore they must know that blind people > exist. So why not think of them in some way, even if it's to talk to the > company they work for about making some changes that could help their blind > customer base, so to speak? To me that's awful. I think we should make a lot > more of a stand to turn the world around at least partially rather than > taking the sighted person's side all the time. > OK. So they've put screenreaders in the IPhone. Good start. But not everyone > can handle touch screens, and that's not just blind people. > Regards, > Damien. > --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
