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

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Jeff,

Couldn't have said it better myself, and you are absolutely right.
Freedom Scientific doesn't really have to put a lot of money into
marketing research etc because they know that U.S. state agencies and
most rehab centers will buy their product anyway. Plus with the SMA
agreements that pretty much insures that Jaws stays in the lead, and
they don't have anything to fear from Window-Eyes, Orca, Supernova, or
anything else as long as the U.S. government keeps lining their
pockets.

I know from experience if a young college student asks vocational
rehab to chip in and buy them an accessible computer they will get a
vocational rehab special. Usually an inexpensive desktop system with
Windows Home Basic on it, Jaws, Openbook, and probably toss Microsoft
Office in with the system too. There are plenty of alternatives to
Jaws such as Window-Eyes, Supernova, or NVDA but they don't even
consider them. Instead of whipping out a thousand bucks for Openbook
they could go for a cheaper mainstream OCR package like Omnipage but
don't. Since the end user gets all this stuff for free its easier for
them just to keep paying for their SMA than to come up for the money
for alternative access tech. That keeps guys like Freedom Scientific
in business.

The government could really save themselves money if they purchased a
new Del laptop or desktop preloaded with Ubuntu 12.04 with Orca,
perhaps a commercial TTS package, and an open source OCR package, but
they are never going to do that because if you start talking about
Linux to their so-called experts you might as well be speaking
Klingon. As far as their techs are concerned Jaws is the cat's meow,
and sadly I've seen Jaws quality get steadily worse the last few years
because they don't really do research on what their customers want or
need. Which brings me to my point.

With Orca we have a chance to focus on real accessibility issues that
effect everyone. Ubuntu 12 can be installed from scratch using Orca
from the live CD. Some work has been done to make Fedora's installer,
Anaconda, more accessible. These kinds of accessibility features are
far more important to an end user than the kind of crap such as
ResearchIt found in Jaws. At least with recent versions of Ubuntu and
Orca I can repartition my drive, install my OS, etc from scratch. Try
doing that with Windows and Jaws.

Basically, what I am getting at is the Orca developers' time is
valuable and we should prioritize what features are most important to
everyone. Is making sure that the logout dialog in Gnome 3.41 is
accessible more important to us than having control+c state if some
text is copied to the clipboard? Is Qt access more important than some
other feature? These are the things we need to think about and
prioritize so that the most important things get done first.

Cheers!


On 6/4/12, Geoff Shang <geoff quitelikely com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is straying off-topic.  I will attempt to make it relevant so please
> stick with me.
>
> In response to Alex' message asserting that JAWS features are implemented
> due to demand, this may have been true once but it's not necessarily true
> anymore.  Two reasons for this:
>
> 1.  They are the most used screen reader, particularly in the USA which is
> their main concern.  As such they can pretty much do what they want.  The
> other screen readers need to play catch-up and everybody knows it.
>
> 2.  Many people take out software maintenance agreements for major
> releases of JAWS.  This entitles a person to the next two major releases.
> Back in the day, these major releases were usually worth it, being notable
> upgrades in performance or functionality.  But now, Freedom Scientific has
> effectively made it a two-year support contract because they roll out a
> new major release every single year.  This of course gives them a more
> reliable income stream from SMA customers.  However, it also means that
> they need to come up with enough new features to warrant a new version
> designation, or at least to make it look like people are actually getting
> something for their money.  So this results in highly dubious features
> like ResearchIt that very arguably should not even be in a screen reader
> being touted by FS as a major feature in JAWS 11.
>
> Now I say all this because we should take this into account if we want to
> consider using the functionality present in commercial screen readers as a
> gauge for what should be implemented in free ones.  My point is that the
> wants and needs of the user are not the only things that drive commercial
> screen reader development, and are quite possibly not the most influential
> ones that do.  Since screen readers like Orca are not subject to such
> commercial pressures, and particularly since they also lack the kind of
> development man-power that commercial money can buy, we can and must think
> more about the usefulness of various features rather than merely copy what
> someone else decided to do.
>
> Cheers,
> Geoff.