Honestly, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart and soul which have both seen heard and experience many horrid things in life, this whole freedom scientific thing is monstrous.
I was sighted not long ago, and believed that accessibility tech and other handicap related accessories were subsidized, given by right by governments or organizations. After my accident, and looking for access solutions with my friend at the hospital, i first tried a free but weird screen reader which name i can't even remember. Then came window eyes, then JAws appeared on google. It seemed ok when installing the trial. Remember that at that point, anything that would allow me to still use the computer was nothing short of miraculous. I didn't even know how a screen reader worked. I then decided to purchase it and thought it would be priced like a microsoft Office or even a windows OS. Boy i was wrong, and suddenly frustrated, angry and bewildered by that 900USD price tag. So i immediately looked for an alternative to this ridiculous and stupid purchase. Consider that adobe products do far more complex things, that a full 3D package with over 2000 paremeters features including modelling texturing animation special effects rendering and post rendering, plugins, tools extensions, extensive manuals, network solutions for renders and awesome rendering engines for various 3d styles of drawing cost just a little over a screen reader, the latter which can be downloaded with a modem with all its features. you can stick Jaws on 6 floppy disks. You need 6 DvDs to have the Autodesk 3D studio max 2010 edition properly installed on your systemm. I tried to make abstraction, think that screen readers were extremely complex things with totally insanely arcane code under the hood, that all these gigabytes and gigabytes of data from professional softwae i used pre accident were just being overpriced. That Quality of the software was in compact elegance and not bloated media stuffings. In short, that i got screwed with all my previous graphic intensive software and that Jaws was written by the hand of god. OK i was just being utterly sarcastic :) Then my father came to visit me at the hospital, and vraught over his macbook 13 inch late 2008, and told me that he found out it had a scren reader, though the voice was seriously whacked. When Fred came up, somehow my dad decided that was the best voice in the bunch LOL, i wasn't impressed, but gave it some patience and learned bit by bit all of what blind computering would be. And i installed a cracked copy of Jaws which i then used for less than a month because my mac experience was so much better. It wasn't even worth trying with a free version, if you technically looked at it. Believe me, i have made the round of manuals forums and tips for jaws stuff. I still got all the nuance voices somewhere. But the jaws itself is just crap. Now i have a macbook pro 17 inch, learning the mac server environment and about to get my hands on a mac mini server for my own business, and have all my devices synched perfectly with mac software that does way more than a screen reader and costs a fraction, a bite of what Jaws costs albeit being more essential to my work environment. These arses at FS thought they could play with a blatant fact of life in blind individuals and make them believe that they couldn't work properly without their software. Its freaking backwards communism. It's dope dealing, its stealing pure and simple. I don't want a freaking pack mate that probably hulks around like a satellite phone unit. I don't want an OCR that i can't carry around and that costs 1000USD. Seriously, a thousand bucks for an OCR? I got the iphone and its beautifully integrated for my business card reading.. And i would never, not for a long shot, not if i was stuck with scrabble on saturn, consider installing JAWS. I hate the limitations on its spatial navigation anyway. TO put it simply, i need a cosmic experience when i use the computer otherwise it depresses the crap out of me. One thing i always opposed in life is injustice. I have seen it everywhere since i was a kid, because we travelled a lot in the family, and during documentaries and reports i would interact with subjects from various communities and ethnicities. I have grown to love the environment and its people, no matter how they are or looked. And i have a sensibility to people with lesser advantages by genetics or fate, than me. And when i see that these people from FS try to suck out all the money they can from blind individuals whose median has a high unemployment rate, and to find out that those who are skilled, positive and professional in their work, are set back by all the bugs and bullshit that FS gives them, whetehr through the software's rigid feeling navigation concept or its dodgy tech support line. I get a gigantic whole in my chest. This level of unfairness is prehistoric. It's like the days of miracle potions that cost a fortune to Ladies of the victorian age which were little jelly fish collagen drinks laced with cherry flavor. These now cost something like40 cents at any convenience store. It's like playing with inflation to justify artificial costs and to lobby around like its gold standard when its an overpriced over speculated and obsolete means of combustion. Think BP the oil spills and hybrid cars of the future. I'm happy someone else is taking over, happy that they are loosing the quote unquote market share in screen reader tech, i'm happy that macs are so stable. Happy that this mailing list exists. I'm happy to be sitting under my apple tree. But being human, i hope they get their acts together and shift the paradigm to serve their customers who paid them dearly for a half baked system they don't even know how to use. Its not fair to keep this mental slavery going, and blind users have more important things to do than to worry if their screen reader is going to hold in a critical situation or when they need it to simply speak out what they want it to speak out. Computers are here to serve us we are not here to nurture the computer with bug reporting and fighting for jaws after getting the cold shoulder from its creators. This is sickening to the bone and it has to change. Yours truly, PS: sorry for this long post, i will make sure to drink coffee before getting on the terminal next time. Best regards, Yuma DX® -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
