Dear Mr Miller, First and foremost, I hope this email finds you well. I have been advised to write to you about matters concerning the Pac Mate Omni and, indeed, I believe I write with respect to matters in which users in the United Kingdom have a common interest.
At the outset I ought to say that in the main, the Pac Mate Omni is a very satisfactory product and I am sure that all users from both the UK and abroad will agree with those sentiments. However, the subject-matter of this email is not to give positive feedback (Such matters have received and shall receive ample coverage in other fora). Let me begin, if I may, by quoting from an email that I sent to the Pac Mate Users email list on Tuesday 25th March, shortly after installing the maintenance release that purported, amongst other things, to fix all UK keyboard issues. I wrote: "Now, I have installed the maintenance release for the Pac Mate Omni and, for the most part, it does exactly what it says on the tin. The UK pounds issue is fixed, as are the quotes, equals, plus signs etc. little did I know, however, that I was swapping all of this for another problem! specifically, when pressing the apostrophe key, I don't get an apostrophe. instead, I get the English accent "grauve" sign. I've tried warm resetting the machine again, and even tried a cold reset, but to no avail." "I must admit that I am getting more than a little annoyed about this type of issue continually seeming to creep through the testing that FS does. I fail, in all honesty, to see how it can happen, especially if one considers that one of the main points about this release was fixing the problems with the keyboard. Isn't there anyone there who does a little bit of typing on the Pac Mate to see how it bears up and to see whether the maintenance release actually does what it says it will do? There really is no excuse for this type of thing." It will be seen from the above two paragraphs what the nature of the latest problem is, and I have to say that it concerns me greatly. The apostrophe is a very common character, of course, and being unable to type it on the UK keyboard is, frankly, unacceptable. However, it is symptomatic in my view of a deeper malaise that permiates Freedomscientific: the above problem should have been very easy to spot. It would have taken but a couple of sentences' typing on the UK keyboard to find that the apostrophe key didn't produce an apostrophe. To put it another way, it was not an error that was concealed within one of the more technical features of the product, rather it is what I would venture to suggest a programmer would consider a schoolboy error. How it slipped through the net, therefore, is completely inexplicable. Yet the malaise goes beyond this particular issue, of course. The very reason for the need for a maintenance release to rectify the UK keyboard was because of errors that had crept in when the Omni was originally released. These errors were slightly less obvious than the latest apostrophe issue, being concerned as they were with symbols such as the sign for UK pounds sterling, but nonetheless they would not have escaped the wit and wisdom of a competent typist. Moreover, I am told that this is not the first time mistakes such as these have occurred - an assertion corroborated by an examination of previous updates for version 4, 3 etc. which show that the UK keyboard issue has been overlooked in the past. One might also add the failure to provide a UK English language speech module for eloquence, when one clearly exists, and far more seriously the failure to recognise any English Braille language other than american English, thereby neglecting the needs in particular of blind children in this country and in other english-speaking countries whose need to read the same braille on paper as on computer is of paramount importance. This is quite apart from failing to act upon the needs of those of us who, quite simply, would like our Braille to appear on the Pac Mate as it does in our books. All of the above, I respectfully suggest, prompts the question of how much Freedomscientific values it's UK clientele. How is it that errors as glaringly obvious as the inability to type an apostrophe creep into a maintenance release whose primary purposes included ensuring that the UK keyboard could be used correctly? How is it that, for all the things that understandably go wrong in releases of software and firmware for the Pac Mate, at least one issue per release, generally speaking, has a disproportionate effect on English-speaking users outside the United states and canada? In a nutshell, Mr Miller, what we're asking for is not the earth, is it? Is it too much to ask your distributors to beta test this maintenance release for you in UK conditions, to collaborate with them in designing a UK Braille table, and the like? Surely not. In the short-term, then, I would ask on behalf of both myself and of other UK users that the issue regarding the apostrophe is fixed, preferably within the next week or so. Given the nature of the mistake and the fetter this places upon those of us who use the Pac Mate to produce documents as a matter of course, this is an entirely proportionate demand and reasonable timescale for its fulfilment. In the medium- to long-term, there clearly needs to be a considerable amount of work done to tailor the Pac Mate to suit markets outside North america including but not limited to the United Kingdom, as any multi-national company with such a justifiably fine tradition of high standards as yourselves ought to do. Please bear in mind that there are many like me, who changed from a Braille Note (Which, for all its undoubted shortcomings, nevertheless had a fully functioning keyboard and, as I now see with hindsight, was superior to the Pac Mate in terms of its Braille translation), having placed faith in a great deal of material generated by yourselves and your affiliates. For my part, I paid £2650 in order to do this, and that money was paid out of my own pocket rather than by any government or other grant as I could not get one. Wireless technology, Office Mobile and Windows Live are all very fine, but surely for that amount of money the least I can expect is a keyboard that I can use, Braille in my own language and a company that does not give the impression of neglecting its English-speaking customers who don't happen to be from the United states. It only remains for me to thank you in advance for any assistance that you can give, and to express my fullest confidence in your acting upon this letter forthwith. I look forward to reading your response. Yours Sincerely, Mark Higgins ------ Mark Higgins Barrister At Law M.A. (Oxon) -- [email protected] mailing list Send administrative requests (subscribe, unsubscribe, change options) to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (use "help" in the Subject line for a summary of common options) You can also use the web interface at: https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi For assistance, contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
