Brian, you're not actually still defending the NFB's reasoning, are you?
It could hardly have been more clearly wrong.
You are posting this to an email list for a free, open source screen
reader. I made my living as the manager of high performance computing at
the University Of Wisconsin with Speakup and Orca. And Jaws still
exists. The price has dropped to $99 though.
Look, the NFB made a mistake. A *HUGE* mistake. That's about as obvious
as it could possibly be.
On 8/16/22 13:14, Brian Buhrow wrote:
hello. Having participated in the debate with Microsoft about
narrator, let me see if I
can provide a bit of context. When Microsoft began putting a real effort into
Narrator, there
wer those of us who were concerned that it would put Freedom scientific out of
business and,
thus, potentially, remove accessibility choices for blind users, especially for
folks who were
currently employed using JAWS or, at the time, GW Micro. Exhibit A was, and
is, Apple with
VoiceOver. If you want to use Apple products with access technology your
choice is, well,
VoiceOver. If it doesn't work for you, well then, tough on you. That's also
true of Android
with Talkback and Brailleback. Yes, Brltty works on Android, but it relies on
the access
provided by Talkback and Brailleback to get its data, so if Talkback and
Brailleback can't see
it, it isn't visible nonvisually.
It takes a lot of effort to make a good screen reader and it takes even
more effort to
keep it running well. The argument ran like this: if Microsoft put a huge
amount of effort
into getting Narrator working well, would they continue to provide the hooks
and data Freedom
Scientific and NVDA needed to make their products work? And, what if Narrator
was deemed good
enough by Microsoft, but didn't work for folks who were trying to hold down
jobs, but JAWS and,
at the time GW Micro, couldn't continue making their products function because
they weren't
getting what they needed from Microsoft? what we said was we didn't want
Microsoft to work on
Narrator at the expense of continuing to develop and share their access API's
with third party
screen reader providers.
While it's true the accessibility scene hasn't played out exactly as we
described it in
terms of the time frame we laid out, it is true that, over time, accessibility
options for
Windows users are dwindling. Case and point, if you purchase the tablet
version of Windows, or
the stock home edition of Windows, by default, you cannot use any screen reader
other than
Narrator on that installation unless you flip a magic switch in that
installation to enable the
full Windows experience. In addition to allowing third party screen readers,
that switch also
allows the installation of unsigned software outside of the Microsoft store.
Microsoft claims
they will never disable the ability to flip that switch, but the fact that we
are one switch
away from not being able to use the screen reader of our choice on Windows, is,
in my view, an
erosion of access. Remember, there was a time when Microsoft said it would
never release a
Windows version 11.
So, while it may be that our message was mis-interpreted, and we may
have not stated it as
well as we should have, the goal of the message was, in fact, to expand
accessibility choices,
not to diminish them.
-Brian
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