First, your grasp of economics is flawed, unless you insist on clinging to 60's style failed NeoMarxcist paradigms. Next, your decimal place with respect to the number of visually impaired people in the US is one place too far to the left, or your memory and imagination has moved it there. The Apple Screen Reader is a primitive sop to keep school bids coming in, and still like any other screen reader, dependent upon the willingness of application programmers and marketroids to program in a manner acceptable to the standards being used for access by the screen reader. Most visually impaired people, those with any residual vision cling to the use of that vision no matter how impaired it's functionality is, and cringe from the necessity to learn to access information with a divergent sensory modality from the one they think of as "normal" and "bespeaking being a "normal" person). And, your idea of JFW shipping with Windows, would stifle progress in screen reader development. If you want imposed constraints on development, and price controls, I suggest you immigrate to a country with such a system then, see how happy you are with restricted choice. I for one don't want any part of your cossetted Nannie State, and restricted market society. Nick On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:06:20 -0500, Lorenzo Taylor wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Competitive pricing with mainstream devices is in fact possible. Last I read, only about a week ago, there are around 35 million blind and visually impaired people just in the United States. And there are much more around the world. The reason that only tens of thousands of assistive devices are sold is because the price is too high for 34,950,000 people to be able to afford to buy them. Secondly, it is totally unnecessary to design the hardware from the ground up in most cases just to accomodate a relatively small group of people. The hardware is not the problem most of the time. It's the software. And with all the free and open source software out there now, it is very easy to reprogram a mainstream device to be more than suitable, and in fact fun for a blind or visually impaired person to use at very little if any cost increase over the comparable mainstream device. And if it is such a challenge to make an assistive device for a disabled person in mass production even though mainstream hardware could be used for this purpose, then it is time for the mainstream device manufacturers to dive into the assistive technology pool and make software that works on the mainstream hardware that they use so that there is little if any increase in cost of production. Apple did it, and now every Mac has a screen reader built right in, so that a visually impaired person pays not a penny more than a sighted person does for the same computer. Yes, Microsoft should include JAWS with Windows, and Nokia phones should include Talx at no cost to the consumer. It can be and in fact has been done with similar products, and should be done with all products. As for things like braille displays, instead of about 20 companies competing to produse 10,000 each and charging as much as a small car for their products, 1 or 2 companies should be producing 50 to 100,000 units and selling them for an affordable price that a person on a disibility check or who works at a workshop could afford to pay and still buy food and pay the bills. It may be speculation, but I think they would find that if the price of their device was affordable for everyone, many, many more people would buy it and they could mass produce a lot more devices at a lower cost. Basically, the relatively low demand for assistive technology doesn't drive up the price. Rather, the prohibitive price drives down the demand. Lorenzo - -- Keep American Idol great! Vote for Mandisa! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFELAH8G9IpekrhBfIRAq4jAKCRcls5cS3+xmTBiN/VieV/DmBgGgCfa86e SspMMU5V2JnTeNLQ4z+9DXk= =pzu1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
