Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book

  • From: Kerneels Roos <kerneels@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:03:16 +0200

Point taken Cina, point taken.

I'm assuming you are referring to the blind community as being the most uneducated consumer base ever documented. Well, this is probably the key. From a local perspective I can definitely say that here in South Africa blind people seem to be very well informed about assistive technologies, and if compared to abled bodied individuals the blind community is on average way more tech savvy. The problem is, the AT space is so complicated and full of all sorts of options. I consider myself fairly well informed, yet every now and again Ihear about something I've never heard about ever before. We should really strive to inform everyone better.

So, I think any new AT device or software is a good thing in itself, the problem is with the system at large, the lobsided market, greedy companies, government interferance -- you named it. Imagine everyone would just back off and let the market sort itself out. I don't know, I just know things could be way better and benefit many more than are benefitting right now.

The encouraging and amazing thing is, amidst all of the injustices individuals arise that break the vicious cycle by offering their second hand AT devices at fair prices,by contributing to efforts like Vinux, and some companies asking reasonable prices.

I salute you / them!

On 3/10/2011 8:42 AM, Sina Bahram wrote:
There's a market alright. Fed by world governments, insane trade agreements, 
blood sucking AT companies, and the documentedly most
uneducated consumer base ever to exist in the history of consumer bases.

I so should not get involved in this thread.

Signing off.

Take care,
Sina


-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dale Leavens
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:10 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book

But so far we don't have the price for the braille display.

What I quoted was the current hardware as shown on the LevelStar Site.

Unless they have some new refreshable braille technology the Orion will be a
lot more than two grand and you can have braille on any number of devices
these days.

I agree. A netbook and at least you have a fully compatible word processor,
one used by the rest of the world assuming one shares documents with the
rest of the world.

for a hundred bucks you can buy a 32 GB card for your Stream. Modern SSD
drives are used these days maybe the Orion will upgrade to a solid state
drive. Even that on the Icon wouldn't justify $1,300.

I will say that I approve the use of braille but for the speed of speech it
will have to get a bunch cheaper before I'll be buying int.

I guess there is a market but I don't see it.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex Midence"<alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
To:<programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book


Well, if it does braille output, it's got my vote sight unseen.  At
the price it's selling for, it looks like you can have a little
braille display for under 2k.  That's really cool.  I still can't
afford it, mind, but it's really cool.  I wonder if you can use it as
an external speech synth and/or braille display for a screen reader on
a laptop or desktop.  That would be really nifty.  The note taker
stuff isn't really that exciting to me.  I can grab a $150 netbook off
of craigslist and load up soemthing like Vinux on there and I have a
powerful note taker right there and then.  You don't even need all the
stuff Vinux comes with pre-installed really.  All you really need is
Pico, abook, tudu, mplayer and Lynx running on something with speakup
installed and you got a decent note taker.  Couple of megs more gets
you emacspeak and you have something that is just as powerful as any
word processor out there, imho.  Add a menu feature of some kind which
launches what you want at the press of a key and you don't even need
to have the command line come up to bring up your stuff.  That braille
display and that speech synth though are very attention grabbing for
me.  Don't get me wrong, I am not knocking all the nice apps featured
on there.  I just can't see myself going into debt for them when I can
get a comparable set of them for ffree on a much much cheaper machine.

For daisy, I have a victor reader which also stores songs.  I don't
need 40 gigs of songs.  IN fact, I have a 2 gig mini flash card for my
music and an 8 gb one for my audio books.  Podcasts, I get through my
android phone and stitcher but a braille display, that for under 2
grand is not to be sneezed at.

Alex M

On 3/9/11, Dale Leavens<dleavens@xxxxxxx>  wrote:
Well, I don't get it.

The LevelStar Site doesn't give much information on the Icon, look like
you
don't get any input other than audio without the docking station which
means
$1,300 for the Icon and $600 for the keyboard, $1,900 altogether. For
that
you get 8 more gigs of hard drive than you get on an iPhone.

I presume you can do input in some way outside of the docking station but
they don't tell you anything about that.

Having braille output albeit only 18 cells will add to the capability of
course but it seems redundant to me to have yet another isolated note
taker.

The iPhone and come to that the iPod touch already does all that stuff
and
more for less.


   ----- Original Message -----
   From: Littlefield, Tyler
   To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
   Cc: Ken Perry
   Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 5:36 PM
   Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book


   I seen that! And even with no price tag, it's already making my wallet
clench up in fear.
   On 3/9/2011 1:39 PM, Ken Perry wrote:








     I can now show you what I am helping to work on.  Here is the
announcement that was put out today.




//www.freelists.org/post/accesscomp/Fw-icondiscuss-A-Glimpse-Of-The-LevelStar-Orion-SmartBooks-At-CSUN-2011






--

Thanks,
Ty

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--
Kerneels Roos
Cell: +27 (0)82 309 1998
Skype: cornelis.roos

"There are only two kinds of programming languages in the world; those everyone 
complains about, and those nobody uses."

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