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:

What Will iCreate?

Singapore has decided to take the lead in assistive technology.

Its International Convention for Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology (i-Create) will be held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Singapore from April 24-26.

The conference is being held in conjunction with the 1st Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and will combine work on helping disabled work effectively with work on helping them become as able as possible.

The Market Charity Model

Most assistive technology is delivered with a charity model.

Governments and private entities, organized on a non-profit basis, unite to create solutions for clients.

This is not the only model for assistive technology.

What I would like to see more of is the market charity model. This is what the Skoll Foundation (right) promotes as social entrepreneurship.

This model first developed as dot-com millionaires and billionaires started setting up foundations to give away their money several years ago. The idea was that, instead of giving money to projects which would help people, they would give money to projects that would seek profits in helping people. In this way, they felt, their gifts would become self-sustaining.

Most of what we've seen at events like the recent SKOLL Forum and the CSUN Conference has been based on the charity model. While there is nothing wrong with such conferences, in creating solutions, I think they're all missing the ultimate point, which is self-sustainability and the market.

Social entrepreneurship, in other words, needs to accelerate.

It's possible many of the market charity foundations may also be missing the boat here. Instead of creating a single entity and sending that into the market, I think it would make sense to fund multiple entities, and to keep funding new entities as new ideas arise, in the same solution areas.

What Cellular Teaches Assistive Technology

What is most vital in creating an active market is real competition. (Picture from Vision Connection.)

This is a problem in assistive technology, where we usually have maybe one and one half competitors. That is, Microsoft delivers, and open source tries to catch up. Those are the only two choices. Thus Microsoft is able to use its technology lead to dictate to those needing assistive technologies, then use their needs to dictate to the rest of the market.

Thus it doesn't matter that there are multiple vendors within the Microsoft space, in, say, screen readers. There aren't enough to create a competitive market, because they are all working on the same platform.

If open source could match Microsoft, feature-for-feature, and match Microsoft's delivery schedule, date-for-date, and if open source were also as able to innovate on behalf of its customers as Microsoft has been, then we would have a competitive market, even if Apple never entered it.

The Importance (And Danger) Of A Warm COAT

The Blind Bookworm reports that some 45 organizations -- state, local, and federal -- have gathered together into a grand coalition they are calling the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, or COAT for short. (The coat at the right is from the 18th century. Why will become obvious.)

COAT has some big dreams:

• Extend disability protections to the Internet, forcing Web sites to support assistive technology.
• Make all TV-like devices support closed captioning.
• Apply closed captioning to IPTV
• Restore video description rules that were knocked out by the courts, and extend them into digital TV.
• Extend relay service taxes to VOIP
• Require accessible interfaces on all consumer devices.
• Demand accessibility for 911 services.
• Get Universal Service Fund money for people with disabilities.
  

The Importance of PDF Equalizer

One of the most important bits of assistive technology around may be PDF Equalizer. It's from Premier Assistive, which has been in business since 1998.

As the name implies this is a tool for dealing with Adobe PDF files. PDFs are commonly used for reports posted on the Web, and in electronic books.

One of the big problems with PDFs is that they're highly complex. They don't have to be linear like book pages. They can have nested charts, links, dependencies of all sorts. These are quickly apparent to those with sight, but to those without it's not so obvious.

So it's not enough that software support reading the text of a PDF to you. If it just does that, you've lost most of the meaning. Given the technical nature of many PDF documents, plain reading won't really help you.

So PDF Equalizer does a whole lot more.

One Ring To Rule Them All

There are so many disabilities, and their needs contradict. Getting them onto the same technology page may be impossible.

So Mike Davies, a leader in trying to build accessibility technology into open source through Isolani, has come to believe. (The ad, on behalf of Joe Clark's Accessibility Research Project, is from Mike's site.)

Recently Davies called out some of the groups he feels haven't met user needs:

GAWDS has failed. Accessifyforum has failed. Accessites is fundamentally flawed. WCAG 2.0 is in trouble.

Naturally, a spirited discussion followed. Mike was quoted, writing "we need a community of people working on the Web (as a content producer, as a browser - or plugin - vendor, as an assistive technology provider), focused on accessibility. And that we simply don't have." Some users attacked Mike while others, like Mike Cherim, defended the efforts he derided.

The truth is something common to open source. Money. Money is needed to get work done, to have that work incorporated into Web standards, and to turn that work into Web sites that are accessible to all.

The money's failure to materialize in the free market is a chicken-and-egg problem. We want something to invest in. I need money to create that. You need protection for the resulting IP to get the money. Which takes you out of the Web standards game entirely, because imposing a fee for using Web standards is just impractical.

The New Platform is a Stick

When I was writing about Always-On technology, back in 2003, at the heart of my talk was the idea that a WiFi router should become an application platform, holding memory and processing power independent of the computer it's attached to.

This would allow medical monitoring, home inventory, or home automation processes to continue even when the main PC was turned off for the night, since these applications have to work all the time to be useful.

Now I'm learning about a new application platform built along those lines. It's the stick memory.

You probably know about memory sticks. These are memory chips connected to a USB port. You plug in the USB stick and gain access to the memory. This caused the final obsolescence of floppy disks, because a memory stick could have gigabytes of data and a floppy just a meg or two.

But it's now being used as an application platform as well. My first initiation into this was RoboForm, a program meant to hold all your personal passwords, sent me by the man who launched this blog, Martin Bayne. Seems they have a version called RoboForm2Go, which runs off a USB stick. This solves a big problem I have, namely the fact that I use a laptop. With RoboForm2Go, I can run my passwords off a stick, and use the same stick when I'm on the road, using my laptop.

One more important point. Once you can load software onto a USB stick, you can load it onto any device with USB memory and run it from there. You could have a screenreader loaded in your MP3 player, for instance, which would run when you're at a friend's computer. (That's what the illustration above shows, from RJ Cooper & Associates.)

Open Source piggy-backing just for you

Since I write about open source as part of my living, I have to admit Microsoft's dominance in assistive technology is galling.

But this is more so.

Sun is bragging that its new ODF Converter, which will move files between the Open Office ODF format and that of Microsoft Office, is its big contribution to assistive technology.

"Right now, our focus is to ensure that people using assistive devices are able to join in with OpenDocument workflows," Simon Phipps (right), chief open-source officer at Sun said. "Because Microsoft hasn't published interfaces for those devices to use, they are all hard-wired to Office 2003, and their users can't migrate to other software."

That's spin, Simon. You're blaming Microsoft for not having interfaces, as an excuse for your piss-poor performance in delivering any assistive help in your product category. So you expect blind, deaf and/or handicapped users to all grab Open Office and your converter software, rather than use Office, which has that support natively?

Know Your Rights and Sue for Assistive Technology

You have a right to software you can use, regardless of your disability.

There are a number of laws asserting this, as Deafgeek notes.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.  The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004. The Rehabilitation Amendments -- they are all there to be used.

Trouble is they are not used often enough.

Open source getting its assistive act together

The open source movement is starting to get its assistive technology act together.

The latest version of the Linux Screen Reader, which runs in the GNOME operating environment (there's another graphical user interface for Linux called KDE), is now out.

Version 0.4 now supports such things as Braille output, cyclic commands (as when you touch a key multiple times to get information on a Web 2.0 site), and its own icon, which can tell you (or others) when it is running.

Now want to get even more bang for your assistive technology buck?

Stop being victims, become advocates

It is vital that in every area of assistive technology, patients avoid the role of victim and become advocates.

Here's a good case study of what's possible.

Doug Rose is a tech writer for a small California paper called the Times-Standard. He's also blind. In addition to his reporting, he and his wife  Patti are members of the  region's technology consortium. 

More Than Words Are Needed

Following its Florida conference last week, the Assistive Technology industry Association hosted a full-day of gab in Orlando, where corporate executives tried to talk things up.

IBM was the main driver of the program, and the result was a business case with numbers like these:

• 155 million people in the U.S. need accessibility technologies of some type.
• Disabled Americans represent $175 billion in discretionary income.

Big numbers. But if the opportunity is so enormous, why are so few corporations pursuing it?

The reason is that this market, by its nature, does not speak for itself. Most of those who speak for the disabled are advocates, who speak from a non-profit or government viewpoint. They mainly see this area as a cost, not as an opportunity.

When your body is locked in a nursing home, or you are locked in your own home by blindness or paralysis, it's very hard to turn that buying power into a market force which must be respected.

Until the people within this market gain more control of their money, and demand entry to the mainstream, this won't change.

So I have the most optimism here regarding the aging of America, especially the baby boomers (of which I am one). We are accustomed to whining, to demanding action and holding out vast sums of money to those who meet our needs.

One Giant Step For Open Source

There is a new name on our blogroll today, Chris Hofstadter's Blind Confidential.

Let me tell you why.

Chris, who worked on the development of the JAWS screen reader at Freedom Scientific, is the first major assistive technology developer to represent the power of open source. He is also the first to understand the need for those in the industry to get closer to Universities, and the research work they are doing.

Open source can help in that effort as well. There is a growing struggle in the University community between those who see the purpose of research as aiding mankind and those who see it as aiding the University. Those who practice the former want more openness in every way, and this includes support for open source.

What Microsoft Has Done Right

Regular readers here know I have a tendency to bash Microsoft.

But there's something they're doing right, something very important.

They are bringing out all their accessibility features with Windows Vista and Office 2007 alongside the launch of the software.

This is especially important with regards the operating system. Microsoft has been working for three years on this release and hundreds of application programs will come out alongside it. These programs, too, can be expected to have accessibility features implemented.

Web 2.0 For All

One continuing frustration is the lag between technical improvements and their adaptation for disabled users. (Image from AndyBudd.)

The Apple iPhone, for instance, does not meet the requirements of Section 255 in the Federal Communications Act. That means your needs haven't been considered, and you really shouldn't be considering it.

As Chairman Mal (the newest addition to our blogroll) notes,

I’m still waiting for access to I Tunes and those nifty little I Pods.  During the ice storm last week, I thought there might be a chance this could happen, but hell froze over with no word from Apple!

The same problem exists with the improvements known as Web 2.0.