Wonder how many would have been buying their car, if the dealer told them
the following:
Since there exists so many manufacturers of tires, car glass, wipers,
exhaust systems, head lights, seat covers, oil, and so forth - we are only
going to sell you the very body of the car itself. You sure are welcome to
buy all the rest from our store, or you could go somewhere else. If you are
good at it, go ahead and invent some parts of your own.
. . .
Well, I am sure, very few of us would have been spending any more money in
that store. True enough, the day our tires are getting worn out, it is a
good thing, there exists choices. And we do appriciate that we don't have to
go and buy a brand new car, just for the sake of some silly tires.
Yes, it is a great capability of WE, that we have got the chance of apps.
And, I doubt after all, that any of you want us back in the pre7.0 days,
when we had to wait for GW to do everything. Let's not forget all the
benefits of apps. But apps should never replace the need for a strong screen
reader's "body". It would really be a pity, if we got that far - as one
lister humouristically put it - that we get a 'shaved to the bone' scrren
reader, and have to download apps for every small detail. A car comes with
tires, headlights and wipers preinstalled. They are loose things; parts that
the manufacturer had to fasten onto the body. WE, does ship with a few apps
today. In many ways, we could tell them to be 'loose parts', that GW
'fastened' to the main body of the screen reader.
Yes, it is a great thing, that whoever has a bit of knowledge, time and
energy - could write apps. But we have to balance that, with the risk of
ending up with the user having to deal with fifty apps. And, when something
goes wrong? The first thing we are told, is to go and talk to this and that
app developer. Bring your car to the garage, and then listen to them telling
you, that: "Since you happen to put on this brand of tires, the fuel
injection system does not work properly. Go and talk to your tire
manufacturer, and we will change the battery for you." Smile!
I am not saying all of this, just to push all the response onto the
shoulders of gW. But quite frankly, we too often hear things like "write an
app". Apps are great, in the sense that they can easily be updated, they can
be written by anyone, and they can enhance the user's experience. But they
can never - or at least should never - replace native functionality of the
screen reader. Well just a reminder.
Now said, I do see the great benefits of the OCR feature as an app.
Unfortunately, I do not have the skills, nor the energy, to write such an
app. Just hope someone will take it on. Seem to remember, there even was
some kind of free-sourced OCR software on the net, last time I looked around
for that stuff. If my memory goes right here, maybe that could be one thing
to start out with, since you then would have no problem with licensing of
the OCR software itself. Just an idea.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Pietruk" <[email protected]>
To: "Richard G Applegate" <[email protected]>
Cc: "'John Gunn'" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 6:51 PM
Subject: RE: Window-Eyes and OCR
Richard
In some ways, we are getting into semantics here.
From the standpoint of marketing and non-techie users, the more features
that are built-in to a product, the more potential customers exist for
that product.
Since GWMicro is in the sales business, they naturally want to find as
many potential new customers as well as existing customers choosing to
upgrade.
Secondly, while aps are nice, I suspect that average user finds things
built-in the product less frustrating than having to download something
and then dealing with the idiocyncracies of individual ap writers.Aps, as
I see it, are often stopgap measures to do something; but if that
something is core to the product, they should become part of the
innerworkings of the product at update.
In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We
have joy
whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it
does not.
C. S. Lewis
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