Hi Jim, I highly agree with you.
Michael Micallef Dip I.T. Office in Charge of Web Accessibility Audits and ICT Training Malta Information Technology Accessibility (FITA) Gattard House. National Road, Blata Il-Bajda HMR 9010 Email: [email protected] Office: +356 2599 2343 Mob: +356 79421278 URL: http://www.fitamalta.eu FITA: http://www.fitamalta.eu Please read our Legal Notice: http://emailpolicy.mita.gov.mt Kindly consider your environmental responsibility before printing this e-mail -----Original Message----- From: Jim Grimsby JR. [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 14:34 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Opinions Of A Former AT Software Engineer Yeh and then for those of us who have more then one disability the problem is conpunded. Being blind and hearing impaird makes it a nice fun mix. When you go to an interview and are having problems hearing the person who is interviewing you and trying to explain how you as a blind mostly deff person is going to do the job. He also misses the point in a few places in the article. He talks about how wonderful NVDA is. It is truly a wonderful program and I am glad we have it. One of the main reasons though NVDA is able to do as much as it does is because of the work that he basicly laughed at gw micro for doing. If they had not helped other companys for nothing to work with standards NVDA would not now be able to use those standards to provide the access it does with out video drivers and the like. NvAcess is taking the same approach gw micro has taken in the past and now if we can get the access standard use it will work with NVDA and window-eyes and even jaws. The next point this fellow misses is you get to the point in evalution of a program where revalution is no longer needed. Major inovations is not really what we need any more. Access is good enough that you now just need evolution. Also you get to a point with programs that what major revalution is realy possible. I mean lets take Microsoft word. Getting us out of the screen reader for the moment. What major revolutionary ways can Microsoft really take a word processer at this point. Ok they went to a ribbon interface. Mixing the menu and dialog interface. They took it to the cloud. That being said you still write documents the way you always have. The same is true with your screen reader. The voices sound better. The access gets smoother. More and more programs become accessible. Some programs get broken and some get fixed some don't. how then do we proseed to make screen reading revolutionary again. Better question even if we could do we really want to. I have been using windows now for 21 year way back in 1992 with slimware window bridge. Back then everything was a innovation. It was exciting. Beta testing in the 90s for bridge later on public betas of window-eyes and jaws. This was fun. It still is fun. Seeing what new things are offered to us and make life better and providing us with an accessible digital life style. While the innovation was fun exciting and interesting half the time it didn't work right so there was a mix of a lot of fun and excitement with lots of frustration. The frustration at times is till there. How-ever it is no where near the level it once was. So no at this point the screen readers don't need major inovations. They need a constent evolution to get better and more stable. The question is is this happening. With NVDA it is. Bugs are being fixed all the time. The package keeps getting better and better. Gw micro is doing the same with window-eyes we are seeing the package getting better with every relece. Jaws is a package that is getting better as well. So we are seeing the evolution of these packages. New features capability and access being added. Now lets talk about bug fixing. The most important thing to think about when you get to the evolutionary faze is bug fixing and stability. NVDA as I said fixes bug and becomes more stable all the time. Jaws has stability issues how-ever they provide releaces quite often to fix bugs they find in the package. Gw micro on the other hand is a little slower to do this. So we don't see has many bugs fixes coming from in house to you the user. That being said when we do get the bug fixes they fix the bugs. Also we have to note that NVDA can afford a faster relece cycle and it is always in public beta and you can use the beta snap shots at any time. They can do this because of the nature of open sorce. Enough has been written else where that I will not bother to explain this here. Fs can afford to relece faster yes because they are larger. Even though they relece faster many of the bugs that they must be able to reproduce that have been around for years don't get fixed. Can anyone say dectalk access 32. Fs synth 32 crashing on windows 64 bit systems and jaws getting unloaded in all kinds of situations for no reason. You know they can reproduce this and they still have not fixed the problem. If gw can reproduce the problem gw fixes it. This being said some long standing bugs in window-eyes still have not gotten fixed. So to sum it up. We are in a evolutionary faze of windows screen rding programs. Evalution is on going. Features and access is being added. Bug fixing is on going. The three in bug fixing at the moment rank as follows. This is my view and my view only. NVAccess NVDA GW micro and window-eyes. Even though the cycle is slower more long standing bugs get fixed. Finely fs and jaws. Lots of bugs are fixed faster relece cycle but long standing bugs that have been there for years are not fixed. Now the mobile situation is another matter and beyond the scoap of this message. -----Original Message----- From: Butch Bussen [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 6:28 PM To: josh n rivera Cc: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: Opinions Of A Former AT Software Engineer Wow!!!! hundreds of blind folks just waiting for screen readers to catch up to get a job. That certainly wasn't the problem when many of us blind were looking for jobs in Nebvada. The biggest hurdle we face is prejudice by sighted people. Perhaps you've peaked in the window and seen gw micro staff just sitting around. hmmmmm. 73 Butch WA0VJR Node 3148 Wallace, ks. On Mon, 12 Aug 2013, josh n rivera wrote: > Wow! > These articles were quite revealing, to put it mildly. It's sad to see > that the two main screen readers out there are, seemingly, sitting on > their back-sides, just coasting, while hundreds of blind persons are > out there unable to find employment, because these screen readers have > not kept up. > > > On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:14:14 -0500 "Gary King" <[email protected]> > writes: > Last night I ran across a couple of interesting articles written by a > former head of Software Engineering of a major assistive technology > company. Since Window-Eyes was mentioned in the articles in a > historical context, I am passing them along to the list. > > http://chrishofstader.com/the-death-of-screen-reader-innovation/ > > http://chrishofstader.com/screen-reader-failure-innovation-deteriorati > on- > despair/ > > Gary King > [email protected] > > > ____________________________________________________________ > ____________________________________________________________ > 30-second trick for a flat belly > This daily 30-second trick BOOSTS your body's #1 fat-burning > hormone > http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5209092b23d3092a3251st04vuc > If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. > > GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
