I take your points below regarding the price of adaptive technology
however some people unfortunately seem to have problems realising just
what adaptive technology involves.
firstly - regardless of what anyone thinks of Window-Eyes, JFW etc - a
lot of time and money has to go into research and development and to pay
the staff as you mentioned.
the high cost of assistive technology isn't just limited to blind and
visually impaired people, I paid $5,000 for my hearing aids, yep its a
fair slug however given that these hearing istruments are the best
things I've heard since I had near full natural hearing some 30 years
ago as a child then $5,000.00 to me at least - given all the research
and obvious development that went on to design these things in the first
place - seems a most worthwhile investment as the instruments allow me
to keep my independence.
There are a lot of people who compare things like K1000 with
off-the-shelf OCR solutions such as Omnipage and fine reader. Whilst
all these products are excellent it has to be remembered that fine
Reader and Omnipage were not deliberately developed and designed with
the visually impaired or totally blind user in mind and that makes a
great deal of difference, Omnipage and fine reader are designed as
"Document Managers", you scan your documents in and store them, making
corrections as required thus you require a screen in most cases to see
what you're doing.
K1000, Open Book etc are designed to scan a document, book, manuscript
or whatever and read it "right out of the box" for want of a better
description and in 9 times out of ten cases that description is
accurate. If corrections need to be made to the recognised volume then
the user has the tools at his/her disposal to accomplish that task so
all this additional development for the user adds to the overal cost.
The above is just one example, I could go on but that should be enough
to suffice <smile>.
On 28/12/2011 4:52 AM, Paul Hopewell wrote:
HI Lynne,
Although WindowEyes may seem expensive it and other assistive technology
products have a small market compared with mainstream software. Last time I
looked the GWMicro team was about 20 strong and they all have to be paid. The
cost of employing each person could be around 100 K dollars including costs
like office space. to support this GWMicro has to make around 2 million dollars
a year, which means they have to sell around 4000 copies of WindowEyes a year.
Software pricing critically depends on sales volumes which will always be small
for specialised areas like assistive technology.
Now to someone like Apple or even Microsoft 2 million dollars a year is a small
sum which they can easily absorb. the only way to get affordable assistive
technology is for it to be included in mainstream products like Apple or for it
to b provided in a not for profit way like NVDA and Thunder. The latter though
cannot bring sufficient resources to bear to keep their offerings fully up to
date with the ever changing user environment.
So lets not be too harsh on GWMicro.!
Best regards....
Paul Hopewell
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