Re: [orca-list] Some bugs with perhaps possible fixing in master branch

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Hi, Thomas,

On 6/4/12, Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi Alex,
>
> One problem though. You assume features like this was included in some
> market research. For all we know Ted Henter and the original
> developers of Jaws just didn't add the feature on their own thinking
> that blind users would need or want that feedback regardless if it was
> strictly necessary or not.
Valid point.  My thinking is that a commercial software vendor with
all its processes and such would also include a nice thorough market
research component prior to introduction of any feature since it
stands to reason that they would want to focus their efforts on
producing something that their buyers want and on something that their
competitors either don't have or improving upon what they do have.
Anything else would prove very costly since they wouldn't stay abreast
of what the market wanted and would fall behind in popularity causing
a decrease in sales which then means less revenue and so forth and so
on.  Jaws is, as far as I know, still the most popular screen reader
of the most popular operating system in use today.  That sort of thing
doesn't happen accidentally.  I then took that reasoning a step
further figuring that the research they would be conducting would be
very specialized for a niche market.  That suggests a greater degree
of cost since the more specialized the subject matter experts you use
for something, the more expensive they tend to be because not just
anyone has their expertise.  Now, did they do this sort of thing for
that specific feature under discussion?  I frankly don't know for sure
since I have never worked for Henter Joyce or Freedom Scientific.  I
imagine it would've been part of a set of features slated for a
particular version or something like that since it is a very minor
feature unlike ... say ... the extensive scripting that went into
making MS Word accessible or all the work they did on making browsing
the web such a lightning fast experience or all the coding they did to
get stuff like Citrix to work for remote desktops and such.  All I can
do is make an educated guess.

The point I was trying to make with my comment is that Orca might
stand to benefit from all the money commercial screen reader
manufacturers spend on market research (how ever much it may be!) by
implementing functionality found in them even if, at times, it seems
trivial to us because we, personally, wouldn't use that feature.  That
was a general point I wanted to make which was brought on by the
example of this control c feature being requested.  Some people like
it and really want it, others, like me consider it a nice to have and
not a need to have, still others would just as soon not have it at
all.

To all who request documentation of freedom scientific market research
budget from me:  Flatly, I don't have it.  If I did, I'd probably have
had to sign so many nondisclosure forms and so forth that I would
never have even brought it up.  I don't know of too many companies
that publish that sort of thing for all the world to find.  This is
why I prefaced my sentence with the world doubtless and why I didn't
state:  "I happen to know for certain that ..."  Or, "Studies have
shown that ..."  OR, "Based on the figures from their market research
..."  ETC. Etc. Etc.

Alex M