What strikes me about the message below is this, and I'm not just being 
whiny and negative.


I am daily amazed and grateful that smart phones do so much, cost so 
little relatively speaking, and provide so much free accessibility and 
independence. My life and the lives of many other people with 
disabilities are richer thanks to the Off-the-shelf a11y offered by 
Apple, Google, and Microsoft; innovations like the Orbit, BrailleMe, and 
Dotwatch; and community efforts like NVDA and the vOICe.


I am equally angered and appalled that the tech companies that serve our 
communities (e.g., the Freedom Scientifics and Humanwares of the 
blindness community) couldn't find the motivation to cut costs through 
their own research and broaden inclusiveness through collaboration with 
mainstream companies.


The following example explains part of what I'm trying to say a little 
better. I use a six-thousand-dollar braille note taker at work everyday. 
It is a vital part of my professional life. But when I had to replace 
one during the recession, I was very lucky to have found financial 
assistance, since my income for those two years was about ten thousand 
dollars a year. Without that assistance, I would probably have had to 
quit the particular job I was doing, bringing my income down to zero. 
For me, this experience was a grim reminder of what people in developing 
countries know:unaffordable technology equals zero accessibility. At a 
different job, I regularly read PowerPoints, PDFs, and epubs--all things 
that would have been much, much easier if the same note taker could 
handle those file types well. Yet in the twenty years this product has 
been on the market, feature changes have been very, very slow (i.e., 
clunky PowerPoint and pdf, and zero epub), and the price has only 
dropped once and only to match a competitor. The company that makes this 
product could have chosen to spend some time and money on ways to 
develop a cheaper display, could have chosen to work with a newer 
operating system to support the file types people commonly use at work, 
could have chosen to balance its legitimate need to make money with an 
equally legitimate need to improve inclusiveness through lower prices 
for products and services, but this company like the other players made 
a conscious choice not to do any of that.


Even the wonderful OCR touted in the post below highlights the weirdly 
limited helpfulness of the disability technology space. OCR products 
were very expensive for a long time. I'm old enough to remember the 
forty-thousand-dollar book reader. By the time I started college, the 
software plus scanner cost the equivalent of six to seven month's rent. 
The current version of Kurzweil is still at a thousand dollars, which is 
much more expensive than similar products for sighted people, products 
like OmniPage and Abby Fine Reader. The Mobile version for the blind 
costs one hundred dollars on Android and tends to crash on the current 
and sometimes previous version of the OS . At this point, I'm finding 
only one KNFB Reader on the Play Store, but for a long time, there was 
one for blind folks ($100) and another for sighted folks ($5), which 
appeared to be the same as the blind version only with corner detection 
turned off. Finally, Kurzweil himself started working for Google, and my 
guess is that his technology is being used by Google in apps like 
Lookout, which at long last is a free and fabulous solution, but one 
that came to us from a mainstream company, not from the companies that 
claim to help our community.


I just needed to vent.

On 11/1/2020 10:53 AM, Jeanne Fike wrote:
> Hi,
> I got the following from another list I'm on. Some may be interested.
>      Jeanne
>
>
> Predicting the future of technology for people with visual impairments
> is easier than you might think. In 2003, I wrote an article entitled
> “In the Palm of Your Hand� for the Journal of Visual Impairment &
> Blindness from the American Foundation for the Blind. The arrival of
> the iPhone was still four years away, but I was able to confidently
> predict the center of assistive technology shifting from the desktop
> PC to the smart phone.
>
> “A cell phone costing less than $100,� I wrote, “will be able to
> see for the person who can’t see, read for the person who can’t
> read, speak for the person who can’t speak, remember for the person
> who can’t remember, and guide the person who is lost.� Looking at
> the tech trends at the time, that transition was as inevitable as it
> might have seemed far-fetched.
>
> We are at a similar point now, which is why I am excited to play a
> part of Sight Tech Global, a virtual event Dec. 2-3 that is convening
> the top technologists to discuss how AI and related technologies will
> usher in a new era of remarkable advances for accessibility and
> assistive tech, in particular for people who are blind or visually
> impaired.
>
> To get to the future, let me turn to the past. I was walking around
> the German city of Speyer in the 1990s with pioneering blind assistive
> tech entrepreneur Joachim Frank. Joachim took me on a flight of fancy
> about what he really wanted from assistive technology, as opposed to
> what was then possible. He quickly highlighted three stories of how
> advanced tech could help him as he was walking down the street with
> me.
> •	As I walk down the street, and walk by a supermarket, I do not want
> it to read all of the signs in the window. However, if one of the
> signs notes that kasseler kipchen (smoked porkchops, his favorite) are
> on sale, and the price is particularly good, I would like that
> whispered in my ear.
> •	And then, as a young woman approaches me walking in the opposite
> direction, I’d like to know if she’s wearing a wedding ring.
> •	Finally, I would like to know that someone has been following me for
> the last two blocks, that he is a known mugger, and that if I quicken
> my walking speed, go fifty meters ahead, turn right, and go another
> seventy meters, I will arrive at a police substation!
>
> Joachim blew my mind. In one short walk, he outlined a far bolder
> vision of what tech could do for him, without bogging down in the
> details. He wanted help with saving money, meeting new friends and
> keeping himself safe. He wanted abilities which not only equaled what
> people with normal vision had, but exceeded them. Above all, he wanted
> tools which knew him and his desires and needs.
>
> We are nearing the point where we can build Joachim’s dreams.  It
> won’t matter if the assistant whispers in your ear, or uses a direct
> neural implant to communicate. We will probably see both. But, the
> nexus of tech will move inside your head, and become a powerful
> instrument for equality of access. A new tech stack with perception as
> a service. Counter-measures to outsmart algorithmic discrimination.
> Tech personalization. Affordability.
>
> That experience will be built on an ever more application rich and
> readily available technology stack in the cloud. As all that gets
> cheaper and cheaper to access, product designers can create and
> experiment faster than ever. At first, it will be expensive, but not
> for long as adoption - probably by far more than simply disabled
> people - drives down price. I started my career in tech for the blind
> by introducing a reading machine that was a big deal because it halved
> the price of that technology to $5,000. Today even better OCR is a
> free app on any smartphone.
>
> We could dive into more details of how we build Joachim’s dreams and
> meet the needs of millions of others of individuals with vision
> disabilities. But it will be far more interesting to explore with the
> world’s top experts at Sight Tech Global on Dec. 2-3 how those tech
> tools will become enabled In Your Head!
>
> Registration is free and open to all.
> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sight-tech-global-tickets-117352240711
>
>
>      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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