<rant> It is not just screen readers that have been a relative disappointment over the past twenty years. I remember in 1988 (or so) being so excited about the possibility about the future of the computers. When talking about DOS one sometimes had to be specific if you were talking IBM PC-DOS, MS-DOS, or DR DOS. There were two or three excellent multitasking programs, like QEMM and Desq View. Vendors where regularly writing elaborate batch files to emulate menus, but my favorite tended to be Shell from the WordPerfect Corp. I still know people who use PE from that era and I almost don't blame them since I still don't have a text editor I like as well as that one. DOS ruled, but it was clear the future was GUI, and there were lots of contenders there, a few I have forgotten the names of. There was GEM that shipped with Aldus PageMaker. Acrobat Reader came bundled with another. There was OS/2. Sun Solaris, BE OS, and NeXT were all under development, but not by those names, and I never got close to them, but there were stories. The GUIs that ran on IBM clones all were quite poor, Windows 2.0 arguably the worse, so I was happy to stick with the DOS offerings which were fast and clean. It was about that time that I got the chance to go work at a university which was heavily Mac oriented. I finally understood how a GUI could actually be useful.
It was about that time that Microsoft began their slow but inevitable domination of the PC industry. Industry jumped liked lemming on Windows 3x because it was so much more useable for noobs who mostly just needed eye candy menu to launch one or two programs. Apple made misstep after misstep during this time. Windows wasn't close to the Mac OS until the end of 1995, but the writing was on the wall by then. http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell/ My mother thinks Gates is a hero for making computers easy to use and bringing them to the masses. I blame Gate for stagnating our industry so much that I believe we are about ten years behind where we would be with robust competition. If it were not for Apple and OS X raising the bar, things would be worse. The only surprise in all that time was the Web, which is quite nice, but I grew up on the Jetsons. I was promised flying cars and robots. I would trade Google for Rosie any day. </rant>
