Shaun,
While I sympathize with your frustration, there are a few things you need to
keep in mind.
First, After Rick's work with Digidesign to make Pro Tools accessible, we
blind musicians and audio professionals who used the Mac with outSPOKEN had
years of excellent access to Pro Tools. Where things fell apart was when
Apple introduced a completely new operating system and there was no
third-party screen reader. This, of course, had nothing to do with
Digidesign and certainly didn't diminish their track record for working with
blind customers. So it's not like we've had 16 years of no access.
Further, the whole issue of accessibility in OS X was a very long process,
throughout which, we didn't even know if the blind would have access to the
OS, much less any applications by developers. As soon as it was clear that
OS X Tiger was a viable system for a blind person to use via VoiceOver, we
began our communications with Digidesign which led to several face-to-face
meetings at their Daly City headquarters as well as the NAMM show in Anaheim
and the AES show in San Fransisco and New York.
Keep in mind that the development cycle for products is not months but years
and this is not a simple application written in Coco. this is a
cross-platform application for OS X and Windows that requires an enormous
amount of work to create and update. Taking two seconds to change one's
mind, as you say, is not at all the case when it comes to corporations that
have production schedules and development cycles like this.
Regarding beta testing, I assure you that, not only are there plenty of beta
testers for OS X who are aware of the issue of accessibility with programs
such as Pro Tools, I happen to be a beta tester for Pro Tools itself and I
was specifically invited to the beta team in the hopes of future testing of
accessibility.
All of this, naturally, doesn't mean that everything is fine and dandy. It
takes a lot of time and effort to continue our progress. By all means, if
digidesign doesn't produce some sort of results, perhaps a legal action will
be warranted but not before we've tried everything to do it in good faith.
Trust me, I make my living as an audio engineer and there's nothing more
that I want but to ensure Pro Tools accessibility, for myself as well as for
others. While I'm aware that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, I've been
around long enough to know that there are preferable ways of going about
dealing with corporations and the people who run them. Incidentally, the
petition we drafted, which Digidesign became aware of by word-of-mouth,
prompted an invitation from them to have a meeting even before we presented
it. The petition was delivered to the heads of Digidesign as well as their
parent company, Avid Technologies. Our communications are with the senior
product manager for Pro Tools as well as vice-president of marketing and
development. I do believe we're talking to the right people.
Please be patient and have some trust that some of us who have had a track
record with Digidesign are working hard to ensure the future accessibility
of Pro Tools.
Best,
slau
