Sylvain Beucler wrote:
Free software users mustn't be enticed to use proprietary software.
If there are multiple backends, the best (or equal-best) backend must
rely on free software. If CUDA is a suboptimal (or equal-best)
backend, that's ok. If CUDA is a better backend than a free software
alternative, that's not ok.
apologies for ripping the conversation sideways but, there's one axiom which
overrides this and that is the area of handicapped accessibility. I feel it's
more important from social responsibility perspective to provide accessibility
aids to disabled users without discrimination as to being free software or not.
What matters is that the software should serve their needs at first so that they
can work, play, and generally participate in the online world.
In other words, disability support trumps politics.
The reason this subject is near and dear to my heart is that I am disabled. I'm
stuck on Windows because I must use speech recognition and there is nothing
comparable to NaturallySpeaking. I will be the first to point out that nuance
displays the worst characteristics of any closed source company in terms of
ignoring users, hiding information about how to interface to the program,
discouraging users from doing anything to make their life better. the license
agreement prevents us from even sharing any enhancements that are available in a
more expensive product. We put up with it because there are no other options.
All of the other toolkits out there like Sphinx, Julius etc. are toys. They are
millions of dollars and decades of development away. This is unacceptable many
reasons but the most important is I don't have time to wait.
so I find it rather frustrating that on top of the typical geek "care I?"
Attitude towards disability support, disabled users of speech recognition get
either indifference or hostility because we dare use proprietary application to
function in the world. I would love to have another option for inputting text.
I would love to have an option that would let me write code again and I would
love for option to be completely free software. I've been looking for options
and there aren't any.
Apologies for the rant but this is a real sore point with me. I contributed a
fair amount of free software before it was called such. Now that I'm disabled, I
can't participate. It is almost impossible to find folks willing to participate
in developing free software for the hard disabilities, the ones where nobody has
built a working model they can chase. and this brings us back to the big point
to the beginning. What I have tried to build projects for speech recognition
dependent users, as soon as people find out we need to use NaturallySpeaking, a
proprietary product at the core, I get all such excuses why we shouldn't down to
outright refusal to participate. Nobody seems to give a shit that that attitude
keeps disabled people, disabled programmers unemployed and pushes them into
careers with substantially lower earning capacity and all the other features of
downward mobility.
--- eric
Speech recognition in use. It makes mistakes. I correct some.
