Devin Prater <d.pra...@me.com> wrote: > I don't think Apple added accessibility for the > simple reason that it was a good thing to do, but with Jobs leading the way > and how he thinks, he knew we were potential customers and if Apple got us, > Microsoft and Android wouldn't have us.
It's true that accessibility provides access to otherwise unavailable markets. I wouldn't be surprised if regulatory considerations also played a role, especially government procurement requirements that mandate support for assistive technologies. Beyond this, there are strong moral reasons for making products accessible - in modern busines parlance it's called corporate social responsibility. Finally, speech technologies have applications well beyond the needs of people with disabilities, and any work that can create a technological advantage in this area can place one ahead of competitors, especially in connection with mobile devices, in-vehicle systems, and other contexts in which vision is preoccupied elsewhere. Accessibility APIs are also valuable for testing purposes, presumably one of the reasons why Microsoft's latest API is known as "User Interface Automation" (UIA). With this, developers can write test cases that exercise the entire user interface of an application. I don't know which combination of these or other reasons has most influenced Apple's policies, or those of any other software developers, other than to say that, in my experience, regulatory requirements tend to carry considerable weight. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
