I don't want to make this message sound defeatist. I applaud your efforts with Panasonic, really I do, but unfortunately none of what the product manager wrote back is not news to us, or at least, it shouldn't be. If a company can't find a way to mass-market something, they're not going to make one version for a couple hundred potential buyers, or even make firmware versions we can flash on our own just for accessibility's sake. They've got to find a way to make people who don't need it,want it. Our kind of accessibility, that is.
What blindkind has yet to fully understand is why the audio interface is so inferior to someone who can see. The best way I can analogize it is, if there were in existence an interface where you could place your hands on, say, a tablet of some kind and size of, say, a pair of side-by-side Braille pages, you could examine the equivalent of an on-screen interface just like a sighted person can--notably, not in single-field quantities, but as a larger, more complete picture. You could run your finger up and down a column of options and tap on them to change them, the change would show up under your finger(s) instantly, and you'd be able to see how the changes you make are integrated with the rest of the interface's data in a much more systematic and complete way than we ever can with speech alone. But because most of us, myself included, don't know anything else, this is how we've learned to adapt. But watching friends deal with these things, as well as having designed more than a few interfaces myself over the years, has taught me a lot about how the screens are designed, and how people's mental and physical focus is directed based on screen layout, something with which we don't normally need to deal. OK, field order on a Windows dialog might interest us, but mostly we don't care whether the things are arranged in grids or boxes or even circles because that's not how the thing is presented to us. Take the two-dimensionality away from the sighted user and make them deal with fields one at a time per focus, and they're lost. They want to see the whole picture. Their eyes want to scrub around the screen looking for patterns their brain has been trained to find and deal with, even if said pattern cannot be matched exactly. That's something we as speech, and even Braille, users, will never be able to do quite like a sighted person can, which is why the manufacturers of technology used by sighted people don't feel that a talking interface would help them, which is why the makers won't make it, because the sellers can't sell it. And in case ya haven't figgered it out by now, that's why blinknology is so expensive. We're one of the smallest niche markets, and once we're tapped out, there just isn't any more. They're makin' fewer and fewer of us blind folks every year, which, of course, is a grand thing, but we who remain are getting a smaller and smaller piece of the already too-short end of an ever-so-slowly but surely shortening stick. _______________________________________________ PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
