Folks,

	The thing about accessible cable boxes has nothing to do
with how many cable companies there are in the US and so forth.
There are only a few systems in common use and all the companies
use one of those systems. It all has to do with priorities and
what is important to manufacturers and the companies who buy
their stuff.

	In the United States, the FCC must approve a large
amount of equipment for type acceptance purposes. This usually
deals with RF radiation, copy protection and other legal issues,
one of which could be accessibility if our hired servants had
both the information and the will to require that some
reasonable method be available to either remotely access all
inputs and outputs or that the device provide information
directly.

	I am not a lawyer, but I would settle for anything such
as fixed-position switches or speech to get around this problem,
but we seem to have adopted a contradictory ideology in which one
voice says that blind people need access to the modern world.
The other voice shouts, "Don't hurt the big businesses. What's
wrong with you?"

	The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but nobody would
get hurt by making it a type-acceptance requirement that display
technology be made accessible. It is almost impossible to bolt
it on later, nowadays, than to just know from square 1 that this
is not negotiable. It must work for everybody period.

	The ADA, as far as I am concerned, is worthless in this
area because it coddles business. No reasonable person wants to
see any business or person fail due to too many rules and
regulations, but some rules are necessary.

	Somebody said, once, that tennis is much easier if you
take down the net.

	A couple of Dollars worth of silicon and a piezo speaker
doesn't cost much these days. The programming time to make the
silicon talk can be amortized over millions of devices but
somebody has to put their feet down and say that this is a
requirement.

	I regularly listen to the BBC and have done so all
mylife and I think that the UK does pay more lip service to this
issue than we do, but I think it is six of one and half a dozen
of the other.

	If accessibility was a requirement in the UK, Canada,
Europe and the US, you can bet your Euros or Dollars that a lot
of stuff would just show up working and we can get on to other
issues.

Martin

David W Wood writes:
> Ah - not so!
> The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
> 
> We don't have accessible ATm nor public telephone boxes.
> There is much less talking stuff in the public sector and also stuff in
> Braille
> 
> ATB