That arguement has lost a lot of weight with me in recent years. Since I moved to the city and started following up my interests, I've come to realize that the cost of making things, any things, is not necessarily all that high. If I produce a piece of music in my livingroom and I want to short run a thousand cd coppies, I can probably do it for about a grand. All kinds of people here are offering custim designs, custom builds, tailored clothing, hand made food, and if it costs a little more than buying run of the mill stuff at wallmart, it's certainly not out of the way for a struggling access technology trainer who really wants a custom piece.
Braille display sells on the other hand are mass produced. At least, I am pretty sure hims does not have a guy on staff whose sole purpose is to sodder braille sells together. The hims braille sell appears in four devices by my count, the braille sense, the braille sense plus, and the syncbraille 20 and 32, one of which has been taken out of production. Let's say for simple math, that each device has 32 sells, and over a 5 year period, 10,000 devices are sold across the product line. That is 32,000 braille sells. Add 3000 for overruns and replacement sells, and you have 35,000 braille sells. Of course, you don't order up 35,000 braille sells at a shot. You probably order up batches of between 5 and 15000, but guys, that's still mass produced and I just don't see the cost being that high over all. Same goes for alva and baum and all these other manufacturers. Well, most of us realize that things cost what they cost. If I had $8000 Canadian dollars I might have been tempted by a braille sense 2 or three years ago. I've for sure enjoyed selling and training on them. What we seem to be missing is the little things that add value to a high end purchase. When you buy window-eyes, it's current feature set retains value over the development sycle of 12 to 18 months. You also get free upgrades and patches during that time, and those patches are relevant to the state of the market. That's a huge value added service, and if it were gone we would all be pretty unhappy. How many of us can say they use all the features of their screen reader? Not me, and yet we got windows seven support for free with window-eyes seven, even though it will be probably another 6 months to a year before more than a fraction of us have adopted it. Window-eyes is great value and shows commitment and responsible development. Braille sense development on the other hand hasn't shown a commitment. There's been no value added to the thing in three years. The time to have started complaining about this would have been last year at this time really. Now it seems they are actually going to do something about this, and customers are seemingly just waking up now to the fact that we're running way way behind. That's not exactly very responsible of us as consumers either, and so we really have ourselves to blaim for the situation as much as HIMS. But my point with this all along, ever since I saw the promo on the "new" office 2007 file support, has not been that it's too expensive, but there's been no value added. As consumers, especially top paying consumers, we should have been more vocal about this a long time ago. Then maybe something would have been done about it sooner. Or maybe not, but we'll never know now will we? Best, Erik Burggraaf Join me Wednesday, May 26th at CNIB Tech Aids fair in Toronto. I'll be at the assistive computing booth from 2 to 4 in the afternoon and circulating for the rest of the day. http://www.erik-burggraaf.com 888-255-5194 On 2010-05-19, at 8:20 AM, Lee Gray wrote: > I'm no economist, but I'm sure it's about the scale of manufacturing. > Regular PCs are produced in much more massive quantities, so I'm sure that > accounts for a large part of the cost difference. > > Lee > > On 5/18/2010 2:56 PM, Bryan Duarte wrote: >> I have had a Braille display taken apart by an engineer >> and they said the concept is there, it is a pretty simple design but our >> refreshable Braille displays are so expensive. now the part that confuses me >> is Braille does not show in color, we cannot watch High Definition on it, it >> does not show high quality pictures, and have to light up, yet it is twice >> as much as a lap top for just a refreshable display. how in the world is it >> that 32 cells of 6 dots popping up and down is twice as much as a complete >> device containing 500 Gigs of memory, 6 Gigs of Ram, CD driver, speakers, >> and a LCD screen with High Definition capabilities? that is crazy if you ask >> me. someone has to step up to make this market more competitive or our >> devices will continue to grow with the cost of living and continue to lag >> way behind in performance. >> >> Bryan Duarte Blind Ambitions >> > > If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, visit: > > http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv > If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, visit: http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv
