Agree with you Anna and then there's this:
 The continuous necessity to buy new instead of being able to upgrade
or repair any or all devices uses up our resources much more quickly
than if we could have upgraded/repaired.  Folks who bought an IPhone
within the last couple of years need to buy a brand new one if they
want or need the newest features. So much of this waste is ending up
as unusable electronic garbage when we're unable to use it 'til it
dies.  This too, creates significant expenses that those with limited
resources find either painful or unable to afford. Tech is great until
it is outmoded, unsupported or the original manufacturer goes out of
business.  I try to stay on the back edge in order to overcome this
but that isn't always possible..  Plus one other thing:
  Accessibility works well with smart phones and computers/tablets/etc
so why don't mainstream appliance manufacturers use it for their
devices. All the progress we've made comes to a halt when it is time
to buy a new stove, washing machine, and the like. With few
alternatives we end up purchasing something that we can only use with
difficulty or assistance. Knobs and switches are mostly replaced by
multifunction buttons or touch screens or, worse yet, thermal buttons
that don't need to be touched at all.
  Just a rant, I guess but sometines that eventually makes things happen.

  Steve Hoad

On 11/1/20, Ana G <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>>      Signoff: [log in to unmask]
>>      Subscribe: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>     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
>     Signoff: [log in to unmask]
>     Subscribe: [log in to unmask]
>


-- 
 Steve Hoad


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