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

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Alex,

On 6/4/12, Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
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.

Yes and no. You are talking like a marketing student. That is good in
theory, but Freedom Scientific is a special case where all the normal
marketing theories no longer apply.

As Jeff so expertly pointed out Freedom Scientific has reached a point
where they don't have to spend money on research or even listen to end
user requests.  Here in the United States its a well known fact that
state agencies, rehab centers, and pretty much any software vender for
the blind sponsor Freedom Scientific products and often fail to
suggest or promote similar products from other companies.By the time a
new client realizes their are other products such as Window-Eyes,
Supernova,  etc they are in the position of paying hundreds of dollars
to switch screen readers, OCR programs, etc which doesn't seem worth
it to them so just decide to pay for another Freedom Scientific SMA
regardless if it has many new features or not.

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.

Maybe and maybe not. To be honest a lot of Windows screen readers are
quite bloated with features, some good, and some bad. Since I've
gotten away from Windows and Jaws I found I can no longer stand Jaws
because it has to many helper messages for new users. Some have been
there for ages such as every time you launch an application it speaks
that message to press insert+h for hot key help or insert+w for a list
of Windows hot keys. I admit those are useful hot keys but there is no
need to speak that message every time a person opens a new program.
More recently there are context specific helper messages like if you
land on the Taskbar it might tell you what the Taskbar is and how to
use it.  A more advanced Windows user such as you and I have to go
into the screen reader and turn all that stuff off just to use Jaws
without going insane. I'm pretty certain I'm not alone, and I wonder
what Freedom Scientific's marketing research would  show if they
polled everyone on how useful all those tutorial/helper messages were
to their end user experience. I'm pretty certain everyone except new
users would find that level of verbosity more irritating than helpful.

Now, I realize people coming to Linux are new to the operating system
and may find a command like Orca+h or Orca+w helpful. However, I don't
see how opening Firefox and having Orca saying, "for a list ofOrca hot
keys press Orca+h. For a list of Firefox hot keys press Orca+w." Once
the new user heard it the first time they would know what keys to use
for additional help, and repeating that message every time a user
launches Firefox is simply overkill. So there are things in commercial
screen readers like Jaws that isn't necessarily in our best interests,
and yet Jaws keeps adding tutorial messages like that in version after
version when I think there are other things they could be doing with
their time and aren't.

Fact of the matter is the last version of Jaws I own is version 11
before I let my SMA expire. One of the reasons for that is simply
because Freedom Scientific hasn't added anything really new or useful
for years. They make a small handful of changes just to have a reason
to change the version number and then charge the end user for it. A
lot of times it is just bug fixes they should release for free, but
end up charging the person an SMA for bugs they failed to correct in
the prior version. Even if they have a new feature its something
extremely dubious like ResearchIt which was suppose to be Jaws 11's
major selling point, and was absolutely useless as far as I'm
concerned. So I don't put much stock in following Windows screen
readers too closely.

Cheers!