It wasn't my intention to support politically conservative thinking on 
the beauties of capitalism and the free market. While competition may 
have helped screen reader companies develop better products in the early 
days, it hasn't done much to motivate them to develop more affordable 
products that help people with disabilities find jobs and participate in 
society, unless, of course, those efforts involve paying high prices for 
the products themselves, for scripting, and so on. What's been more 
helpful to the community lately have been less capitalistic endeavors 
like NVDA, a screen reader developed by a couple of guys with private 
donations; the Orbit braille display, also developed with money from 
private donations; and various Kick Starter projects, like the one 
currently being pushed for making Dragon more accessible to screen 
reader users.


My question was more literal. How is the fact that one company owns two 
lines of competing products in the areas of screen readers, screen 
magnifiers, video magnifiers, and braille displays likely to benefit the 
community? I can't imagine that having all these great minds in one 
location will prompt them all to change their business paradigm. I'm 
wondering what kinds of changes we can reasonably expect.


On 6/14/2016 8:12 PM, Tony Swartz wrote:
> While I appreciate the business analysis, it is somewhat simplistic, and I
> suspect motivated by partisan politics. In fact, there has been a movement
> among Wall Street players to focus on niche markets, in this instance, the
> low vision market, to buy up the more significant companies involved. It is
> not so much a move to stifle competition as it is to be the leader in a
> particular technology. Current projections indicate a significant growth in
> the incidence of low vision over the next two decades. The companies
> involved in these purchases while meaningful to us with no vision, are being
> snapped up because of their low vision technologies. Over the last decade,
> there have been other examples of The strategy to buy up/corner, disability
> related technologies. So nothing new here, nor is it based on current
> economic conditions.


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