Hi,
In my opinion, it's extremely distructive for the blind when a
government pays for proprietary software, and not less bad when a
government pays for extremely overpriced hardware.
Exactly this is what supports monopolies and keeps the prices high.
JAWS is absurdly overpriced - how many people have bought it for
themselfs, with their own money? It has no chance on the free market.
Of course FreedomScientific are happy with over 900% profit.
The governments, spending the taxpayer's money, should support the free
software, instead of making a few companies rediculously rich - the
same applies for Microsoft, too.
And the profits in the accessibility hardware are not much different in
percentage, except the prices are 5 times higher. No, I don't want a
$5000 or $10000 braille display, thank you very much.
They have returned their investments a million time, and the normal
logic would be to lower the price and saturate the market, but no - why,
if the governments provide them with a constant flow of money.
That aplies to every business on the accessibility market - why they
would start a price war, when they all lose at the end - they'll lose
their high profit margin. Now, those who lose are the customers, but who
cares for the customer? Yeah, they all care right, but this is nothing
more than a marketing BS.
And how exactly the customer loses? Firstly there are a very small
percent of those who need this technology who actually get it. For
screen readers that's not the case from 2006, thanks to Orca, NVDA and
VoiceOver, but it applies for anything else. And it can't be otherwise
with this prices.
Second, that prevents other companies for entering the market, which
again helps to the monopolists to keep the high prices, but not only
that - why would they improve their products, when there is no
competition? Yeah, there are many braille display vendors, but they have
their own teretories, where one or the other is a monopolist.
In my opinion, the people who work in the governments look us as an
unpleasant liability, so they throw money (which are not theirs) over
such companies (and organizations), as far as the blind get off their
heads. They don't really care how those money are spend, as long as they
can tell the voters "This year, we gave X millions for the blind, yay!".
And the organizations don't care either - you'll teach me how to use
JAWS? No, better not. Actually, it's the organizations, who promote
those products, cause guess who is one of their other donors. And if we
could say that they recognize NVDA - it growed too much to be ignored by
anyone, I'm sure they don't recommend it to the blind people. And if
they recommend JAWS instead of NVDA, the chances they would recommend
Linux at all are negative. No, JAWS is not superior to NVDA, not for 99%
of the use cases, not in 2015, and for sure not regarding the price. For
those few cases which NVDA doesn't cope well, it's cheaper to find a
sighted help, instead of buying JAWS.
And if you have used Linux long enough, you would know that it is
superior to Windows in many more arias, compaired to those arias which
is the opposite. Unfortunately, accessibility is not one of those arias
for the most people, but it would not improve itself - it needs people,
who have a will and knolage to do it. And those people need money - they
won't work for free and you can't blame them - it's their right. In
contrast of proprietary software though, if you give money to a free
software developer, those money don't disappear - they transffer into
source code, which anyone could improve later. If you give money to
company, which develops a proprietary software, they could always close
doors (if they're not financialy satisfied, for example), and you end
with nothing.
So, use free software, promote free software, and pay for free software
- as much as you can. It's very sad we can't donate directly to the guys
and gals which develop the accessibility infrastructure under Linux -
that would motivate them enormously, and will also motivate others to
join and we'll not be the guys who always complain any more.
There are also many other ways you could help free software:
http://itsfoss.com/help-linux-grow/
And if you live in USA, please stand up against this:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/09/02/1513259/new-fcc-rules-could-ban-wifi-router-firmware-modification
Best wishes,
Zahari
На 3.09.2015 в 18:28, John Heim написа:
Kyle,
You should apologize for using the term "blind government entitlement
babies". That's offensive.
On 09/02/2015 10:08 AM, Kyle wrote:
Sorry for the upcoming rant, but some of this nonsense I'm seeing drove
me to it.
I can still build an 8-core x86_64 computer for less money than it
currently costs to purchase even the least expensive open source
braille displays, which are still costly prototypes. Once braille
becomes as affordable as say for instance a computer monitor, then
maybe more people will have the means to code for them, and braille
won't be just for lucky blind government entitlement babies anymore.
Until then, braille is always going to be too expensive to get enough
people working on to improve it. Sorry, that's just the way it is. And
no, I didn't use braille back in the days when I had access to Windows
either, because I'm not a blind government baby who expected all the
expensive stuff to be handed to me like I'm entitled to it or
something, which is also why I use Linux now and help where I can to
raise awareness and to contribute where I can to its development and
wider usage by *all* people, not just entitlement blinks. No, Linux
isn't "catching up" as you Microsoft and Apple lovers so eloquently put
it. It's here, and it's far ahead of anything else you could be using.
So get used to it.
Sent from my Cancerian beast
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_______________________________________________
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Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
GNOME Universal Access guide:
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Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
