I definitely agree that going through a learning curve every few years
for improvements that are mostly not earth shattering is hard and
inconvenient, as is spending money on a new version of various software
packages. I also agree that there's no need to hurry out to buy a new
computer, etc., if the old one is working fine and will be replaced soon
enough.
What has bothered me about the whole Windows 8 / windows 10 upgrade is
that most people in the assistive tech industry have not helped our
community by providing information that is honest and balanced. Instead
of pushing through the learning curve and saying, "Windows 8/10 does A,
B, and C well. some problems are D, E, and F, and workarounds are ....,"
they put a lot of energy into spreading information that has ranged from
the incomplete to the inaccurate and they've actively encouraged our
community to keep buying Windows 7. We went through the same thing when
Voiceover was introduced and are still going through it with respect to
android.
As a community, I think we need to be more open to the idea that
inclusion is often different from what we think it should be, that
inclusion often asks us to behave and think in ways we're not used to,
and that inclusion often involves an element of risk. The payoff is
usually worth it, but we need to be willing to try new things, think in
new ways, and take new action to address issues we honestly believe to
need remedy.
For example, as a community, we complain about paying for a new version
of Jaws every year, yet we don't learn or teach one another NVDA, which
is now robust enough for use in many educational and professional
settings. We and our advocacy organizations don't push Microsoft to make
Narrator a full-fledged screen reader. Instead, we continue learning and
teaching Jaws, encouraging our organizations to tell Microsoft to work
with Jaws, and reaching into our pockets to pay for Jaws updates. I'm
not picking on Jaws because its inherently evil. I'm using it as a
symbol of the many things wrong with the assistive technology industry,
which does as much to help people work and participate in society as it
does to keep them from doing both.
I'll get off my soapbox. It isn't my intention to offend.
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html
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