A-Tech Review

Blind Fear Wafra Purchase of Freedom Scientific

The purchase by Wafra Partners, a private equity group based in Kuwait, of Freedom Scientific, which sells the market-leading JAWS screen-reader, is causing some fear among advocates for the blind.

Blind Confidential investigated and got a cool reaction from Freedom employees:

Communication with the FS rank and file has resulted in people telling BC sources, “we were brought into an ‘All Hands’ meeting and told that the company had been sold,” but no Freedom personnel is saying to whom the company may have been sold and details like the selling price remain undisclosed. Some FS employees have grumbled that their stock options turned out to be worthless but no one seems to know the threshold above which the company had to sell in order for the employees to make some money on the deal.

Make Accessibility Standard in Software

Accessibility needs to become a standard offering on Web page authoring tools. Right now, it's so difficult to maintain sites responding to screen readers that hardly anyone does so.

As Darrell Shandrow at Blind Access Journal notes, even the U.S. Senate can't meet the standards. There are great free tools out there like WebXact which can measure whether a site measures up, and the Web Access Initiative offers advice, but we really need software.

Price vs. Service in Assistive Technology

As the price of a product drops, and its market increases, the amount of service and support you can get on it goes down.

I first learned this important law from my late father. In the 1960s he ran a TV repair shop called TowerTV. He got out of the business in 1973 for personal reasons, but it turned out his market timing was excellent. TV repair quickly disappeared as chip technology made TVs more reliable. (This picture, believe it or not, was taken when my dad was 65. He passed away in 1999.)

And anyone who got into repair soon found that the same forces would work faster-and-faster as they moved up-market. Fact is it's now more expensive to repair a consumer video camera or PC than it is to just replace it.

That's what people do now. Lots of niches, like the one occupied by my friend Alex Randall back in the day, have virtually disappeared, and the biggest problem with the electronics industry today is its environmental impact -- pollution on the front-end, landfills on the back end.

Support, training, some help here? Fuhgetaboutit.

How to really celebrate Disability Awareness Day

Tomorrow, at Cal State Sacramento, they will be holding a Disability Awareness Day.

There will be technology demonstrations and " a tour of the Services to Students with Disabilities High Tech Center located in the Academic Information Resource Center, Rooms 2010 and 2011."

I know. I'm so excited I could plotz.

This is the kind of self-congratulatory group hug we usually see from well-meaning people, It's show-and-tell. And I should add, before continuing to sound snarky, that the University of California system is the most advanced in the world, when it comes to delivering assistive technology solutions to students.

But here are some alternate activities: