Re: "Accessibility in Fedora Workstation" (fwd)

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	Hello.  I'm going to stop soon, but I'll try one more time.  The conversations I
participated in weren't ones where we asked Microsoft to stop development on Narrator.  They
were conversations where we asked them not to develop Narrator to the exclusion of keeping
other screen reader developers out of the loop.  We recognized that Microsoft was only going to
put so much resource into developing the APIs and Narrator, and if they didn't keep the third
parties in the loop, we might end up in a situation where the existing screen readers  didn't
work at all and Narrator wasn't really ready for prime time use.  The point that's ben missed
here, is that the only reason Jaws, NVDA and any other third party screen readers work at all
is because Microsoft has worked hard to make sure they will continue to work.  If Microsoft
decided to close those APIs, while there might be a large hue and cry in our community, I doubt
they would get into that much legal trouble.  Consider, for example, how much effort was
expended to get them to accept third party browsers on their platform.  Yes, they do and now
they embrace it, sort of, but there is no way the blindness community could mount the kind of
effort it took to get them to change their minds about browsers, which I could argue, is still
not entirely a resolved question, since there are times you still need to use Edge if you want
to do certain things in Windows.

	I hear and appreciate the argument from those who cannot afford to pay for extra software
in order to use Windows.  But consider this, today, NVDA is a very viable option which can be
had for free.  Even better, it came about without the total destruction of the eco system built
around Jaws, which, whether you like it or not, supports a large number of blind folks who are
gainfully employed.  It may be that Freedom Scientific strongly discouraged Microsoft from
developing Narrator, I wouldn't put it past them to have done that, and it's true the NFB
didn't decry their efforts, but in the conversations of which I was a part, and I realize Iv'e
said this before, it was always about making sure all access developers had equal access to the
Microsoft APis and could write the best screen readers possible.  NVDA is the shining example
of the success of that argument.  If Microsoft had pursued the holy graille of making the best
screen reader possible, they would have done it at the expense of the third party AT developers
and we would be in much worse shape than we are now.

-Brian




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