Re: What are the odds?

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:38:41 +0200, Maurice Carey  
<maurice@thymeonline.com> wrote:

> How much money do you think it would take to pay some open source coders
> (preferably people who are already hacking on firefox, konqueror) to  
> come up with a better <strike>Screen</strike> Web Page Reader.

A lot. People have been building these things for years, and it turns out  
to be very difficult.

> What are the odds someone in the large and dedicated community of people  
> who fight for the rights of the disabled could get a good fund raiser
> going to pay these programmers to build a reader?

Google, Mozilla, Sun, IBM, the European Commission, even Opera (which  
normally wors strictly in house rather than sponsoring external projects)  
have collectively put up, to my knowledge, around $10 million toward this  
goal. (This is in money given to projects, on top of our own internal  
work).

> I say web page reader because 90% of the people I know only read the Web
> Page part of the screen.

I'm not sure this is true. Most people need to log in to their OS, and  
most people need to read and write mail...

Finally, if you don't keep the thing updated it dies very fast. Home Page  
Reader was a great product, as was pwWebspeak before it. But they are no  
longer really worth using...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
chaals@opera.com   http://snapshot.opera.com - Kestrel (9.5α1)

Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2007 03:52:07 UTC