Hi everone,
I recently thought it would not hurt to send Skype a message through their official suggestion method regarding Skype 4.0 and the fact that there are a lot of people with visual impairments of various degrees who use Skype with accessibility software. I mentioned how the 4.0 Beta was not working well for us and below is the response I got, promptly I might add. I was impressed that I got such a personalized reply and that it really is a good reply and that it includes good information since in fact it mentions Doug's scripts which I am surprised they know about. I also think it wouldn't hurt if others from the list or maybe the list owner on behalf of everybody one here would compose an e-mail to Skype emphasizing the importance of accessibility because it seems that Skype is interested in that. Here is the message now: Hello Sieghard, Thank you for contacting Skype Support. We are happy to hear that you are interested in the new Skype version 4.0 Beta for Windows. Your feedback is important to us and we will review every comment that we get! Our designers and engineers are lined up to make improvements to the final version of Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows based on the feedback that we receive. Please keep an eye out for updated versions of Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows. Skype itself does not yet provide a solution for the blind community, but we are working on this. However, there is a small group of blind programmers who are working to maintain a set of script files for the popular JAWS for Windows screen reading application. You can find a list of JAWS Scripts for Skype at the following link: http://www.dlee.org/skype/ Unfortunately the product is not yet marked as "Skype certified" and we can make no assurances that the third party application is safe to use. The fact that something is not certified does not of course mean that it is not safe to use. To date we have started to certify hardware and will begin certifying software as well. You are of course free to download and try any third party software, the best advice is to test and install at your own risk in a controlled environment. Please let us know if this has resolved the issue. Should you need more assistance, feel free to contact us again; we will be glad to help. Best regards, Jozsef - Skype Support
