Re: What are the odds?

Maurice Carey 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.
> 
> 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?

Is this a "put your money where your mouth is" call to accessibility 
advocates? If so, I'd consider that we have the likes of Opera, Apple 
and Microsoft on this list as well (whose funding power may be slightly 
more considerable).

Also, there are already open source solutions out there such as Thunder 
http://www.screenreader.net/, Orca http://live.gnome.org/Orca, NVDA 
http://www.nvda-project.org/ - with varying degrees of complexity and 
usefulness.

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

Just having an aural/voicing browser on its own is fairly useless to 
blind or visually impaired users if they can't actually operate the OS 
in the first place. Hence the complexity of of screen readers - they 
need to hook into the OS at a fairly fundamental level (and the OS, in 
turn, needs to expose adequate hooks and APIs for them).

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Monday, 10 September 2007 23:14:35 UTC