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Re: FW: HTML - <abbr> and <acronym> settings

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Mar 23, 2006 2:50PM

On 3/23/06, Austin, Darrel < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> > It may be more productive to petition the screenreader makers
> > which have products which are actually used.
>
> As was stated, a lot of software companies are in the business of making
> money.
> If their product is the one that is already used by the most, there's no
> reason for them to care about any petition.
> They would, of course, care about competition.
> IMHO, of course.
> (BTW, I'm not specifically saying screen reader software companies are
> like this...just saying in general...)


Since the discussion is about open source...

I think you might not understand how entrenched the current screenreaders
are, how difficult it is for a new software company to come out with a new
product, how hard it can be to test and debug a screenreader, and how hard
it is to gain acceptance within the community (e.g. marketing to the
disability user base).

If you can do that with people working for free, more power to you; but it's
really not as simple as just saying "if you don't like the current
screenreaders, write your own." Even if you could write one, you'd have
many other huge obstacles that can't be solved by open source code writing.

I think it makes more sense to recommend fixing screenreaders than it does
to imagine that you're going to a write a free, open source screenreader
that will put market pressure on JAWS (or whoever) and possibly get them
worried over the competition. Existing screenreaders are heavily entrenched
(for a variety of reasons) and it's hard for new, for-profit companies with
investment money to break into the field.

--Kynn