Boom boom! What a post Gordon! Amen to it!
Kind regards, Jackie Brown Twitter: @thebrownsplace Skype: Thejackmate -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gordon Smith Sent: 03 January 2014 19:27 To: Techno-Chat ... Technology Enthusiasm! Subject: Re: App Evaluation: Seeing Eye GPS: Three Organizations,One Stellar Effort! - AccessWorldR - November 2013 Hi Jackie I totally agree with you on this. Actually, the SMA policy which Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, Dolphin Computer Access and others employ is probably questionable under UK law but, as the originating company is not bound by that legislation, their dealerships get away with it. As for the resetting of tokens being open to piracy, thats true in a way. But let me tell you something. Duxbury Systems dont seem to be doing too badly and they use that technique. I have used DBT for over 10 years now, and I find their upgrades policies to be most fair. When Duxbury Inc. issues a new release, its packed with features. Those features are not the bells and whistles we see in Jaws, Window-Eyes and even Hal/Supernova. Actually I find Supernova to be a very over-rated product in itself. I own a current copy because I must, my livelihood dictates that I have the source material available to tutor others. By others, I mean colleagues and pupils alike in the Primary school where I am now employed. Im expected to know how to use all of these accessibility products and I must not be found wanting in that regard. Suffice it to say that Im fairly conversant with VoiceOver on Apples platform. :) Im even quite so with GW Micros Window-Eyes. :) I am also I would venture to suggest fully conversant with Hal/Supernova. That said, a trained monkey wouldnt find it too difficult to become conversant with those products. ;-) My next nut to crack is Jaws. I freely admit that at this point I probably have quite a lot to learn in that respect. I also know though that I will be the proud, (maybe not) owner of a Jaws license within as many days as it takes Sight And Sound to get their proverbial fingers out and deliver me my ordered copy, courtesy of Access To Work. Oh yes, and I almost forgot to mention those good folks at Serotek. They dont charge a bean for upgrading if youve bought their screen-reader or their other applications such as DocuScan Plus for Mac and PC. If those organisations can do it, why cant Freedom, GW and Dolphin? I really wish that the US and EU legislators would get it together with Witch, and whatever the US equivalent organisation is called, and really do something to rebut these companies to prevent them from acting like proverbial bandits. Dick Turpin would have been proud to be associated with any of them. Im sure youve heard the old joke Jackie, but Ill very quickly reprieve it from the archives of not that funny but, often, appropriate humour: Q. What did the director of Freedom Scientific say when he was accosted in the UK by an angry customer demanding his money back? A. Im the ghost of David Crocket this Pound note stays in my pocket! ;-) OK, yes, I know, its outdated, but you get the idea Im sure. Oh yes, and Im not Freedom-bashing, not specifically anyway. I just happen to think that their practices and procedures are in need of a consumer-friendly overhaul. Perhaps that would help to restore their increasingly precarious position within the field of assistive accessibility. After all, NVDA now has some highly skilled programmers supporting it, and actually given that the software is being developed actively, and given that all they ask is a donation now and then, its darn good value for money. I have frequently said my piece in our groups regarding Australians. Well, not all of them, but some of them. I really dislike their totally false but high sounding self-importance is terms of global leadership etc. They seem to believe also that they are a class or two above everybody else, again, totally false. However, I have to give the developers of NVDA a great deal of credit for what they are seeking to achieve. They have turned what was once a very inferior product into a very viable option to the others in its class and on its platform. Indeed, I personally helped the head of the Visually Impaired department at the Kings Academy in Middlesbrough to remove Jaws from every computer on their network, after he took office in September of 2012. We told Freedom Scientific what they could do with their highly over-priced site license. We removed it as I say not only from the desktop machines, but also from every single school-owned laptop. We replaced it with NVDA which is now the standard in not only that school but an increasing number of others with similarly forward-thinking and financially squeezed heads of department within the UK. I have lobbied quite a few of them to the effect that their budgets are being squeezed tighter and tighter with every passing year by central government and local councils alike. It is time that more of them got the message, and now that seems to be happening. I work for one such head of department and she trusts my judgement, so she told me in an E-Mail just this morning. We dont have Jaws at work, simply because the money isnt there and in any case, well, Ive said it all already. But yes, the remaining budget needs to be spent not on lining the pockets of those who walk on the stratospheric moon, but on the education of our clients, the children we so loyally serve. We are there to provide for their academic needs, not, as I say, to help the rich get richer! Jill, my boss, and I both believe that the children are our number 1 concern and priority. I honestly believe we can, after all, change the world. What a different place the world would be if only others took a similarly courageous stance. I refer to both private individuals and others, in education and even commerce, the world over. What, I wonder, would Freedom Scientific and its fat cat proprietors do then? But to elude just for a moment back to the point I made earlier, or rather, my speculative point, In other words, Sight And Sound wont be able to smugly rely on their several thousand Pound contributions to their economy for much longer. Ill tell you something else as well. I have reason to believe that Sight And Sound may be in some degree of financial difficulty. I cant say much more on that one on list, but it wouldnt surprise me in the least if we were to see some radical change in dealerships in the second or third quarter of this year. Anyway, rant over. In summary Jackie, well said, and it would seem that you and I have much in common in terms of our views regarding assistive technologies. Kind regards <--- Gordon Smith ---> <[email protected]> Information Technology Accessibility Consultant; Providing Help & Support To Young People LivingWith Visual Impairment, plus Braille Transcription services. On 15 Dec 2013, at 10:53, Jackie Brown <[email protected]> wrote: I agree with your comments regarding Freedom and their practices. I have had enough of paying £125 every two releases of a product that is just full of bells and whistles most people don't use in their day-to-day lives. The argument Freedomites use is that R and D costs a lot of money, which is why they charge what they do for their updates. But I started my JAWS journey from 3.2 in 1999. Since then, I could have bought the product over and over with the outlay I have put into it, and that is only me, one individual among thousands. The worst bit of it all is that if you choose to skip an upgrade for whatever reason, there is no margin for doing so with Freedom, you are just penalised and pay more next time you upgrade. In fairness to K1000, if you jump from say version 5 to version 13, you are only charged the same amount you would need to fork out for if you moved from version 12 to 13. In my view at least, this is fairer. And on the subject of the Freedom ILM system, you can't even send your token back to the Internet, even though there is an icon to do it within JAWS. How ridiculous is that? I used to use a Braille translation package called Braille Maker, and whenever I was doing maintenance to my computer, I would send its only token back to the server to protect it from being corrupted. Once I had done the necessary and obligatory cleanups, I retrieved it. Why can't Freedom be like that? I asked Eric Damary about it once, and he said they had decided not to allow this method because it was open to piracy! ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> --------------------------------------- ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
