Re: When is the last time anyone has read a braille book?
Actually, I think it's the exact opposite--the price is so high because the market is so small.
(Question: do screen readers indicate formatting like italics, bold, etc, when reading with a braille display? I'd check, but my PM40 has been unresponsive for over a year, now.)
Building a PACMate costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. This is pretty expensive, honestly, but there is so little effort being put into solving the engineering problems with the dots, and whenever someone does it, they're a small group or individual with no funding, so it becomes a small flurry of news articles, then is never heard from again.
Freedom Scientific sells PACMates for around $3000. That's ten times the price of production, but can they reduce the price and remain profitable?
FS employs programmers who, by necessity, tend to know their way around the nooks and crannies of Windows better than quite a few Microsoft programmers. They h
ave to run tech support, keep Jaws and magnifiers and so forth updated, deal with repairs to damaged hardware, and do whatever it is they do to keep the faith of hte government in spite of the advent of free screen readers that can compete. Notice their new training programs that everyone was talking about last week? That seems so bizarre until you realize that it's being marketed to governments and schools... because that's where all the money is.
Those Microsoft-tier programmers have skills worth an absolute minimum of $60,000/year. They could be making around twice that in Silicon Valley. Do you suppose that Freedom Scientific sells enough combinations of Jaws licenses and PACMates to pay for salaries like that? 20 PACMates and 60 Jaws licenses could pay two entry-level employees for a year... but no one likes paying that much money very often, so in practice, people will try to make their notetakers and screen readers last as long as possible (I mean, I have a Br aille 'n Speak 2000 sitting on the corner of my couch right now. This month, it finally stopped reading menus and corrupted all my data, and I am sad.).
We're a tiny market with less money than most markets, needing things that the sighted equivalent required well-funded teams and mass-market competition (or Cold War competition, at least) to develop.
So, what I'm saying is, give me a million dollars. ... Ur, no, two million; the first million would pay off student loans and go into a reliable index fund so I can live off the interest. The second million, though! I could buy, like, ... *sigh* a mere 100 Senseg SDKs / Brain Port V100s / full page braille displays with an 8second refresh rate. ... It'd probably be more efficient to buy a factory and build a thousand full page displays that way, or invest in engineers, or something.
(Some of that million is going into audio game development; let's be real, now. )
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