I thought the proliferation of touchscreens and screen readers was enough to show that regular society doesn’t give a flying fuck about the needs of the disabled?
A braille terminal costs a cool couple thousand bucks, so what’s a poor blind person to do? Get stuck using a fucking smartphone and screen readers.
Like even the equivalent of an Amazon Kindle for blind people is $700. A Kindle isn’t cheap, but holy fuck, it’s not $700, it’s more like $150.
$700 is a bargain. My kid got a speech tablet which is just a small Samsung tablet with a speaker mounted on the back and they billed our insurance $3500 for it.
Mainly because insurance paid for it but also because I don’t have the skills to replicate their software even though it’s essentially just text-to-speech software with what might as well be considered clipart images.
This could be the kind of device that could benefit from being open-sourced and 3D printed, combined with relatively accessible and low-voltage electronic parts out there.
I thought the proliferation of touchscreens and screen readers was enough to show that regular society doesn’t give a flying fuck about the needs of the disabled?
A braille terminal costs a cool couple thousand bucks, so what’s a poor blind person to do? Get stuck using a fucking smartphone and screen readers.
Like even the equivalent of an Amazon Kindle for blind people is $700. A Kindle isn’t cheap, but holy fuck, it’s not $700, it’s more like $150.
http://www.orbitresearch.com/product/orbit-reader-20/
It’s obscene and makes me sad.
$700 is a bargain. My kid got a speech tablet which is just a small Samsung tablet with a speaker mounted on the back and they billed our insurance $3500 for it.
Why not just buy a high end tablet and speaker at that point?
Mainly because insurance paid for it but also because I don’t have the skills to replicate their software even though it’s essentially just text-to-speech software with what might as well be considered clipart images.
This could be the kind of device that could benefit from being open-sourced and 3D printed, combined with relatively accessible and low-voltage electronic parts out there.
I’ve watched blind people use iPhones just fine before when I participated in User Testing of some web software.
It’s amazing what the accessibility functionality on iOS does.