I'm not saying leave everything as is. Stuff like what your friend has, it's 
not unreasonable to see what can be done about that, VCR's and the like, I 
don't see a problem fighting for them to be more accessible to a point. The 
only place I have a problem is when you can use about 90%+ of the features 
and still want more. If you can't make something do what it's supposed to do 
and work with all the important features, then, there's a problem and some 
one should try to work with these companies to see if something can be done. 
It all can start with a nice phone call or email. If some one's nice about 
things and has ideas on things that might help, that's a good thing but some 
people, if they go to companies with the attitudes they show online or what 
ever, and I think they like to hear themselves talk and really never do 
anything about it, but if some people do take those attitudes to the 
manufacturers, I can see why nothing's being done because I'd do the same 
thing to them.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harvey Heagy" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: off topic xm and serious


> John, I agree that people can get ridiculous when pursuing accessibility,
> but conversely, if you say you are willing to live with only a certain
> amount of accessibility then what does that leave us.  I would think only 
> 10
> percent of the web is fully usable by a blind person.  I don't mind if
> everything isn't completely and totally accessible to the blind.  Only two
> good eyes will accomplish that.  But this problem is becoming more and 
> more
> critical.  Not only do we have inaccessible menus to deal with, but some 
> of
> them time out such that if you don't make your selection within a certain
> amount of time, you are back at either the main screen or the previous 
> menu
> without knowing where you are.
>
> I have a friend who has a digital oven which is supposed to default to the
> last temperature setting she leaves it on, but it doesn't always do that,
> and there are no audible cues to let anyone know what temp it is set on.
> And there are only up and down arrow keys to set the temperature with. 
> This
> is critical when attempting to do recipes.  Would it be too much to ask if
> there were audible cue tones for each five degree differential in
> temperature up or down, or better still keypad entry so that you know
> exactly what temperature it is set on?  And speech really isn't that hard 
> to
> program into something.  After all, they can program novelty style speech
> into different products, so why not functional speech?
> Harvey