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Re: BrowseAloud

for

From: John E Brandt
Date: Mar 24, 2011 6:39AM

Patrick's response below mirror my sentiments exactly. The BA people were here in Maine a few years ago lobbying hard for the State Gov IT Dept to put it on all their websites. I was not impressed.

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 6:53 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] BrowseAloud

Personally, I dislike BrowseAloud's business model. The plugin works potentially with every site, but as a client you need to pay them to get added to an explicit whitelist of URLs that unlocks its functionality.
They've been offering discounts/free accounts to government and education for a while, to drum up apparent adoption.
(oh, and the fact that, back in the days, there were incidents of obvious astroturfing campaigns like
http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=22009 doesn't fill me with confidence either).

Users that need speech are far better served with having something running on their machine that works on all sites, not just on select ones that paid to get BA to run there.

IMHO, of course,

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke