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Re: BrowseAloud

for

From: LSnider
Date: Apr 2, 2011 11:33AM

Hi John and Patrick,

That is very interesting information, thanks for sharing it.

Cheers

Lisa

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 5:35 AM, John E Brandt < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
Patrick H. Lauke

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.