Ten years ago, I'd said that the government should not mandate accessibility into software, but now, it would be so cheap, when the price was spread out over the cost of the product to the general public, that I now believe that it should be law, that a device needs to be usable with and without a screen. I mean, it may have a screen, but it should be just as easily usable if the screen was covered. I'm guessing it might cost a dollar or 2 over the cost of any particular product using software, if it was mandated. Glenn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lorenzo Taylor" <lorenzo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 2:14 PM Subject: Re: New Linux PDA For Blind People -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The voice in a blind-friendly mainstream product should be no problem for a sighted person. If they don't like it, they don't have to turn it on. It's that simple. The concept I'm going with here is that a blind-friendly product won't make a company much money. This is the excuse given by all the companies out there who are making tons of money off the government agencies and blind people themselves who can make the sacrifice it takes to buy such a product. So why not make the mainstream product blind friendly at no cost to the consumer? The voice could be turned off by a sighted person if he/she doesn't like it, or better yet, it could be very easilly turned on by a blind person if he/she needs it. Voice synthesis is extremely cheap to implement now, so it wouldn't cost the manufacturer any additional money to make it work, and it wouldn't reduce the functionality of the device. As for the open source mandate in MA, I think it's a good idea. It's the proprietary nature of screen readers for the unfortunately most popular OS that makes it difficult to work with for some blind people. The screen readers for Windows are based on proprietary technology and for the most part only work with proprietary technology. This is changing slightly, but not enough. This is what makes blind people think the state of MA is doing a bad thing by trying to cut costs by switching to a superior open source technology. Just think what the state was doing when they forced everyone to use Microsoft formats, or Microsoft forced the state to use their formats, whichever you like. Lorenzo - -- Keep American Idol great! Vote for Mandisa! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFELDwiG9IpekrhBfIRAurTAJ9Px4P1N9DM9586a6B0V85BIb7yjQCgh+Fr dC/+Z2UTJJ7gXnx6334kNUA= =dq8D -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
