But none of these companies have any innovative financing models to offer me. I loved Deborah Kendrick's review of the Focus Blue 14, and immediately wanted one. It simply did it and waited for the blind community to handle its advertising for them. Though I do believe it is important to promote one's research, I note that much of what we hear about at CSUN never becomes a real device we blind consumers can purchase and utilize.Īpple, meanwhile, never bragged about its plans to make the iPhone accessible. And since most conference attendees use their agency's funds to attend, taxpayers' dollars are being spent on little more than a pricey promotional junket. It's kind of sad really that one could pay $500 to attend a conference, another couple thousand for the hotel stay plus meals, and all that money is spent merely to learn about devices that are still basically just research projects! Even where products being sold are showcased, most sessions about the new screen reader update or the new braille PDA are purely advertising. And Comcast keeps pontificating, since 2011, at blindness conferences about their new accessible set-top box, but you can't order one yet from its customer service. I venture far more blind consumers want access to Quicken than QuickBooks. Though Intuit has been working on access for a couple years now, Quicken still isn't accessible. Just a few years ago, Sun MicroSystems was demonstrating Linux accessibility at CSUN, and it has completely disappeared without much improvement in accessing the graphical environment under Linux, either. Google is making lots of noise, but Talkback is still tricky, Google Groups is confusing and forget Google+. To cite just a few examples: I've been reading about IBM's access adventures for decades, because they always speak at these conferences, but IBM has little to offer the average consumer. There was so much "pie in the sky" at the 2014 CSUN Conference that isn't even available! There were so many companies at this year's AFB Leadership Conference promising greater accessibility which has not been delivered much so far. Not dissatisfaction with AccessWorld, which always does a splendid job, but with the stagnation of this industry on which it reports. As I read through the April issue, I felt a rising sense of disappointment.
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