[gui-talk] The Mosen Excursion

[Seville Allen]

To me it is most likely because the AT community we deal with is quite
small, basically, two major companies and Mosen is a high visibility person;
he moved from one of the bigs to the other, so yes, people talk about that
surprise change.  


-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Hoffman, Allen
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 8:21 AM
To: gui-talk at nfbnet.org
Subject: [gui-talk] The Mosen Excursion

All:

Just something to think about regarding Deborah Kendrick's article
regarding the energy in the blindness community over Mr. Mosen's
employer change.  In her article she theorizes or postulates that the
energy is due to the fact that Mr. Mosen is blind.  While she may be
right in her theory, if so it is troubling to me, and should be
something blind folks might consider as they move forward in their
continuing love affairs with technological solutions.
   
The assistive technology marketplace is small, with a small set of
vendors, and a small set of customers.  Government purchasers are a
significant portion of the buyers, and educational government buyers are
a large portion of that.  The market is not consumer electronics and has
no intention currently to become that.  Would we base a buying decision
regarding a consumer electronics item on the fact that, company X has
fifty employees who are blind, and company Y has two hundred?  

So what?  If people in the blindness community are upset about one
person who is blind changing alliances, then their analysis of how to
select products for their use is flawed from the start.  Personally I
don't assume that a product will be better designed by someone who is
blind than someone who isn't, and to think so is throwing in a whole
load of assumptions about both sets of people.  I think that often
people who are not blind don't take the time to understand how items
really do need to function for people who are blind, but then again,
people who are blind often don't take that time for themselves either.
its a "roll the dice" situation really--depends on the person, not the
disability!  

Maybe the lesson learned here is that disability-centric thinking can be
problematic when applied too often.

one of my general principles I always try and promote in life is that
the world should work for everyone--universal accessibility.  HumanWare
has taken the approach of making a specialized product that does not
really ride on the electronics market, as their interfaces are all
proprietary, while Freedom Scientific has gone another path.  Both
approaches produce proprietary, expensive solutions.  its a preference,
but please, lets not base a preference on the concept that there's a
person who is blind in one camp as opposed to the other.

Just my ten cents worth--inflation ya know.