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Re: Something's amiss with the latest survey

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Sep 1, 2015 3:05PM

Andrews, David B (DEED) < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Finally, I may be old school in my views, but I separate
> screen readers from "screen enlargers," or "magnification
> software." Clearly the line has blurred somewhat, with
> Zoomtext and Magic offering more screen-reader-like
> features,

We presume that respondents used the screen reader functionality of
their software regardless of their disability type. We'll be more
explicit in future surveys to try and better delineate between screen
reader only usage and screen reader usage as a supplement to some
vision.

> I do not know of any totally blind person using either
> one as a screen reader alone.

I hope that more than anything that the survey is causing us to
question statements like this. I'm reminded of someone that told me
they didn't know a single person that voted for Romney over Obama.
Well, there were 61 million people (47.2% of voters) that did.
Someone's personal interactions within their limited sphere are easily
believed to be the norm when often they are far from it.

> So, lots of good data, and it helps us see trends, but
> people shouldn't take the numbers literally.

Why shouldn't they? It's not like we made them up. You might be (and
should be) skeptical about whether the numbers represent the entire
screen reader user population, but I can assure you that the numbers
we report are "literally" what the 2515 respondents indicated.

Jared