RE: Screen readers - usage stats?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Access Systems
> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 9:52 PM
> To: David Poehlman
> Cc: Ian Anderson; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Screen readers - usage stats?
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, David Poehlman wrote:
> 
> > There is no clear answer from here on your issue but 
> perhaps there is a best
> > practices somewhere.  I always look for something 
> independant of the at
> > issues to work with becaused you are on more solid ground 
> if you do.  Other
> > wise,to be fair, you have to do a lot more testing with 
> other environments
> > as has been pointed out.  Even if market stats claim 95 
> percent of screen
> > reader sales are jaws, that may not even nearly accurately 
> reflect what is
> > really going on around the world.  You can do one of two 
> things with regard
> 
> especially with the open source solution in which there ARE 
> NO SALES so no
> one knows how many people in the world or anywhere are using 
> EMACSpeak.
> EMACSpeak is free and downloadable, and freely copied and 
> shared, now how
> do I figure out the market share??
> 
> Bob
> 

One reasonable way to estimate this (US figures only; sorry) would be to use
the market share for Unix/Linux *on the desktop* (no fair counting servers!;
this article http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/22/HNlinuxdesktop_1.html
says 1%) and apply that to the number of screen reader users (NCHS 50K in
1994, revised by me to 150K).  By this rough estimate, there are about 1500
Emacspeak users in the US. 

BTW, is there an emacspeak listserv?  Is it international?

Received on Friday, 16 April 2004 07:00:34 UTC