Thursday, January 24, 2008

How to stop a Microsoft employee in their tracks

I have been to a few Microsoft talks now where they show off shiny new things like Silverlight and Surface and suchlike. Each time I have seen this new technology I have asked "So how would a blind person use this technology? I usually receive some sort of reply which is a mutter about how they don't deal with accessibility issues in the UK. They don't very much deal with it in the US either!! I'm sorry I know I sound miserable but if Microsoft Surface had made it, a tactile version would have been the best thing for a blind person because they would finally be able to experience the full advantage of a graphical user interface, and not an audio version of it, which takes a long while to work your way around. They would be able to point and click on things, draw vector-based images (and even Bitmap images) and this would help blind people to appreciate the full potential of a PC. Braille displays are here but at the moment, they are expensive one-line text-based devices. Come on people! Instead of wasting time ripping us off with stubborn product activations and DRM that stops us putting our favourite tracks onto any MP3 player of our choice, why don't we move the development of tactile displays on because this would be something that could really take off in the Blind community!

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