On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Jamal Mazrui wrote:

> The following letter was sent on November 14, 1997, to Bill Gates
> by the National Federation of the Blind.

Great letter.  What kind of response have you received?

I noticed, though, one major thing in the letter that seemed to have been
left out.  NFB, for all its supposed power and largeness, didn't even hint
at a plan for solving any of the problems for which it demanded
solutions--no test plan, no evaluation schedule or procedure,
etc.--leaving it all in the hands of Microsoft is almost like leaving the
fox in charge of the hen house.  THey'll come back with some piddly-diddly
little plan and say it's good, NFB will reject it, and round and round
we'll go.  Somebody at the NTC really ought to come up with a formalized
test plan, specs, procedures, you name it, and submit it to Microsoft and
say "this is what you should be doing, this is how to go about ensuring
your software is speech-output technology compliant, etc., etc.", not just
simply say "you gotta fix this" with no ideas communicated as to how it's
supposed to be fixed.

And don't even think about saying "Oh, but it's Microsoft, they're a big
company, they oughta know about how to do testing and evaluating ..."
Stuff and nonsense when it comes to blindness issues in the software
development field.  If we want Microsoft to be known as the company that
makes software designed with blindkind in mind (wow, that could be a great
ad campaing for them now, couldn't it?), I'm afraid we've got to show them
the way, not just tell them there is one.