Hello Everyone.
My name is Jeremy Hartley, and although I am brand new to this list, I
have
worked in the assistive technology business for almost 17 years. I have
worked both as a technology trainer and consultant to assistive technology
companies in California, as well as ran my own Internet Service Provider
in
the late 1990's.
I bring all this up as a bit of a background to what I am about to say.
For the last several posts on this topic, I have been reading how people
would like access to Quickbooks, and other financial software, as well as
access to, and I quote, all audio recording software. I will approach
this
topic this way.
First of all regarding quickbooks and other related software packages.
Many years ago, folks from Gw Micro, Henter-Joyce, and I'm sure Slimware
and
Berkeley systems got together with Intuit software. For those who don't
know, Intuit is the maker of Quickbooks, and Quicken, which was a very
popular software package for many years both in DOS and Windows. During
this time, Intuit was willing to work with assistive tech developers to
try
to make their software more accessible. I know there will be some on this
list that were around during those times and they may say that I am
leaving
a lot of stuff out, but I am just trying to lay some things out here. A
bit
later, some of the Intuit folks for various reasons were not as willing to
work with AT developers, which made the process of accessibility of such
products slow and sometimes impossible. I am not sure what Intuit's
feelings on accessibility are at this point and time, but I can state with
almost 100 Percent certainty that Freedom Scientific, and their
competition
are working to make these software packages as accessible as they can,
given
the tools they have available.
When I say tools available, I am referring mostly to the cooperation that
they get from software developers. Bringing up the Intuit example again,
one real bone of contention many years ago was the way that Intuit
developers decided to draw controls such as buttons and lists on the
screen.
Although they looked like the above mentioned controls to the sighted
user,
the screen readers could not decide if it was a button, list, or glob of
dust on the screen. Granted, there are tools out there for reclassing
custom controls, but even that has its ups and downs.
All of this is true as well in the world of recording software. Trust me
folks, companies like Freedom Scientific and others are totally aware of
the
fact that a lot of us are musicians, producers, and musical hobbyists.
Again, a lot of things come down to how a program is written from the
absolute ground up, that will dictate what a screen reader can do with the
interface.
I do realize that Jaws and other screen readers have scripting
capabilities,
but we must remember that scripting languages will not answer all
accessibility questions. While scripts are a fantastic tool for a lot of
programs that would otherwise either be difficult to use if not
impossible,
they can't solve everything.
What I am saying here is that it is a give and take between AT developers
and mainstream software companies. This sounds a bit simple I know, but
all
of us, be it users of products, developers of products, or developers of
accessible technology need to work together to bridge the accessibility
gap.
In reading some of these posts, I get the impression that some folks feel
that it is completely up to the makers of Jaws to answer accessibility
questions. I get the feeling that there are some who feel that no work
is
being done on various types of software, and while it may be true in some
cases, there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that a lot of your
everyday users are just unaware of.
Also, I have run into people who say a certain software package is not
accessible, when in reality they just need to use the tools available to
them in their screen readers, such as their jaws cursor. Yeah I know, the
Jaws cursor doesn't solve all problems, but I can't tell you how many
people
I run into daily who had no idea how to practically use the jaws cursor.
It
is sad to me that more don't take advantage of tools like frame manager,
jaws cursor, or hot spot clicker and other such programs.
All of this was not meant to berate anyone, but I think some of us, myself
included will post to lists like this without thinking sometimes. Let's
face it folks, we have no idea who in the assistive technology field are
either looking at this list daily, or browsing the list archives on
freelists. If a developer sees posts from people that are unintelligible
or
otherwise unreadable, they will shake their heads and say, lists like this
are not worth our time. Do I think that companies like Freedom Scientific
are doing everything I would like to see? No I don't and I think every
company has room for improvement.
Ok, rant over. grin
Jeremy Hartley
--
JFW related links:
JFW homepage: http://www.freedomscientific.com/
Scripting mailing list:
http://lists.the-jdh.com/listinfo.cgi/scriptography-the-jdh.com
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