[nfbcs] The Mac Beckens

[Gregory Kearney]

Everyone;

I would like to address this matter from a wider perspective. I will not engage here in a Mac vs. Windows debate which is a bit like arguing about whose religion is better than whose. Rather I would like to look at some history and long term trends.

When Microsoft first envisioned Narrator, which was long before Apple's VoiceOver. It was promoted as a built in full scale screen reader. Microsoft at that time went to the NFB and presented the idea to various parties. What they were told was that a built in screen reader would limit consumer choice as having a screen reader as part of the OS would, in effect, wipe out the market for third party screen readers such as JAWS or WindowEyes. This is very likely true as later events would show.

Fundamentally there are two approaches to screen readers. The first is like JAWS where the screen reader is adapted the programs which are run. The other approach, followed in the Windows environment by NVDA is to build a screen reader that follows all the accessibility standard of the OS and then expect the applications to be modified to meet those standards. This by the way is the approach that VoiceOver employs as well.

The problem for screen reader companies going forward is that the computing market is undergoing a major change in the coming decades as we move away from computers to mobile devices. The two major vendors of which are Apple with it iOS platform and Google with the Android platform. In both these cases the screen reader is part of the OS. No one builds a third party screen reader for tablets and the ones that at one time existed for mobile phones are no longer offered as the phones upon which they ran are not offered either.

Given this state of affair the decision by Freedom Scientific to not build a Mac version of JAWS so many years ago (pre MacOS X) now looks to be a particularly bad given that Apple and then Google would end up in dominate market positions in the emerging platform.

Another issue is one of the market for screen readers. While it is true that the blind make up but a tiny minority there is a potential screen reader market far greater in size. Persons with profound dyslexia are three times as numerous as the blind yet this population of screen readers consumers remains virtually untapped.

It would seem clear that moving forward the market would move further and further away from the third party screen reader and towards ones that are part of the OS given that the future of personal computing lies in personal mobile devices which have come to dominate the world's, and in particularly the developing world's markets where the real growth in this century will be found.

At some point I would expect that Microsoft will either upgrade Narrator to be the full scale screen reader they intended or buy out an existing one, most likely NVDA given the technical design considerations involved. However by that point the personal computer market will likely have shifted away for the personal computer to the personal device which will have their screen readers as a basic part of the operating systems of those devices and thus will be the end of the screen reader market as we know it today.


Commonwealth Braille & Talking Book Cooperative
Greg Kearney, General Manager
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