Blind Planet

By: Boris Throbaum

 

“It must have been 1953, right after my sophomore year at Fairleigh Dickenson,” said the retired Exxon executive.  “I got an internship with General Foods in their food coloring division.  I majored in chemistry and it was a good fit.”

 

“What did you work on?”  I asked.

 

“The first summer, our objective was to find the color for the shit that would later be called Tang.  I thought the stuff tasted horrible but GF thought they could sell it and I worked on the color.”

 

“In lay terms, our readers probably don’t understand a lot about chemistry, can you describe what you did?”

 

“Well,” he continued, “ in the laboratory, we developed different compounds that would likely not make people sick that ranged in hue from a sort of a sandy very pale yellow to a natural juice color all the way to a shockingly bright orange that we all kind of laughed at.”

 

“And…” I prompted.

 

“We got sent up to Harlem, right across the street from the AT&T building on the west side to see which colors the customers preferred.”

 

“Why Harlem?”

 

“Because, as our boss explained it, if any of our colors make anyone sick, no one really cares if its only negroes (the word he used at the time) so we were minimizing risk.”

 

“What followed?”

 

“We spread out the drinks in different colors all the way from least colorful to most.  Most of the pitchers contained some color of the Tang mix, one contained actual orange juice and a couple had the juice but watered down a bit.

 

“Except for those with real juice, all tasted identical, that was sort of our control in the experiment.”

 

“What did you learn?”

 

“We had to go back to Jersey and work on some more colors.”

 

“Why?”

 

Nearly 100% of the tasters chose the brightest colored drinks.  It didn’t make sense, real fresh squeezed juice versus the crap we built in the lab in Jersey, where people do believe in better living through chemistry but this made no sense.  Tang tastes like shit but people overwhelmingly chose the brightest color.

 

“So, we went back to the lab and came up with even brighter colors and back to Harlem with an array that contained really delicious fresh squeezed juice in its natural color and a variety of brighter shades that ran all the way to LSD 25 orange, a color that looked as though it came from the Manhattan Project.”

 

“And what happened?”

 

“Are you just stupid or have you never seen Tang?”  Asked the retired oil man.  “The blacks picked the nuclear orange and the taste tests went the same around the rest of the country.  People, it seems, don’t give a shit about taste when they can get their drinks in a brighter color.

 

“We were so proud when NASA picked Tang as the beverage to send to the moon.”

 

“What happened after your electric tang tests?”

 

“I went back for my junior year and the following summer we worked on making Lipton Noodle Soup as orange as we could.”

 

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Recently, I have read a lot of blogs that focus on blindness and technology simply repost press releases with no commentary or criticism.  Thus, having google news alerts on “Freedom Scientific,” “Window-Eyes,” and others in the biz, I find that I get hits on posts that, for all intents and purposes contain identical material.

 

Most recently, I must have seen at least a half dozen reposts of Dan Weirich’s statement on the FS v. GW patent lawsuit.  Weirich says some interesting things in his short statement but one only need read it once, perhaps directly on the GW blog or in the press release directly if you receive such.  I think this shows a general laziness and lack of courage on the part of the blindness blogosphere as receiving a statement and simply copying, pasting it and posting it with no analysis, commentary or criticism, positive or negative, provides those of us who read a variety of these blogs with a lot of duplicated information and absolutely nothing that the bloggers we respect enough to read regularly think about the issue.  I have spoken to some of these people on the phone since FS filed the suit and there is no shortage of opinion or analysis going on but the public statements from independent parties are few and far between.

 

One blogger did title his repost of the GW statement as “GW Responds to the Idiotic FS Suit,” which at least said that he thinks the lawsuit is idiotic.  While I oppose all software patents on principle, I can say that “idiotic” is probably not the right adjective as a US Federal District Court felt it had enough merit to warrant a hearing and judges at that level don’t take many whimsical cases onto their docket.  The blogger spent no time explaining why he felt the suit was “idiotic” but, rather, just pasted Dan’s statement in and let it ride.

 

Patent and other IP law can be very complex, seemingly ambiguous and even appear contradictory at times.  There are many very nuanced bits of language in the FS patent and possible ways for GW to respond both in the court of public opinion and in the District courts.  I would think that instead of simply reprinting posts by Weirich and Lee Hamilton, the bloggers should provide commentary, opinion, and something else to turn their posts from simply repeating the various corporate propaganda and proffering editorial information that can better express their stance on the suit and why they think one or the other side is correct.

 

It might be an interesting exercise for the blind blogosphere to try to organize an amicus brief on behalf of one of the parties in the suit or one that takes neither side but provides an explanation of the technology, its user community and the potential effects that a decision favoring either company would have on us.  Providing those who follow the blogs as their primary form of information would benefit from we so-called experts dissecting the corporate statements and delivering the information in a manner more friendly to our readers.

 

I suppose I’ve ranted enough.

 

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For the past few years I have used the spam filter (called “junk mail”) feature in Outlook 2003 and 2007.  Consistently, it has done a terrific job of filtering out virtually all spam sent to the handful of email addresses I use.  Recently, though, emails claiming to be from CNN containing my daily news alerts have been passing right through the Outlook filter and into my Inbox.

 

My first clue that these emails were junk came with my not having any recollection of signing up for CNN news alerts (I use google news for such).  So, without even opening the first of these notes I found in my Inbox, I went directly to the Outlook Actions menu, selected “Junk Mail” and then “Add to Blocked Senders.”  Since then, Outlook hasn’t caught a single of these phony CNN posts and, for each one, I have gone through the Outlook junk mail procedure in hopes that it might start to catch on.  Sadly, I find four or five of these CNN mailings sneaking in every day.

 

Does anyone out there have a strategy for stopping these?  Does anyone know what it is that these spammers did to break the Outlook filter for their messages that 99% of the other spammers haven’t figured out? 

 

I can’t say this is the worst issue I’ve ever encountered but it is quite annoying and I would like for it to go away.

 

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I love words.  In another life, I could imagine myself as a philologist, linguist or lexicographer.  In this life, for better or worse, I became a software engineer and manager thereof.

 

Software has always had its own jargon and vocabulary used by people in and around the biz and universities.  Many of these have even leaked into the mainstream.  With the explosive growth of the Internet, people who ten years ago had no computing skills frequently use words like “spam,” “bug,” “blue screen,” “crash,” “interface,” “CPU” and so on.

 

Recently, I have dedicated nearly all of my time to working on access technology programs that fall into the category known as “free software” by some, “open source” by others and a few other terms used by different groups of people to try to describe the licensing schemes applied to different software.

 

Richard Stallman, the individual who most credit with coining the term, “free software,” and the somewhat more descriptive, “free as in freedom” and I have discussed finding a term that can distinguish between these different licensing schemes and declare accurately which are “free as in freedom.”  The word I suggested, libertyware, seems to contain the concept very well.

 

The word “free” can mean a number of different things when applied to software.  One may think it means without monetary cost or gratis which is clearly a legitimate definition.  Free might also mean “without restriction” which would include all of the software that is covered by GPL and some other libertyware licenses.  In the access technology field, we have an additional monkey wrench tossed into the vocabulary gears as, in the world of technology for people with vision impairment, the largest company,  the one that sells JAWS, the most widely used software in this particular market niche is called Freedom and is spelled with a capital “F” as it is a proper noun

 

Deconstructing the vocabulary of how the words “free” and “freedom” apply to software in our field led me to inventing the term libertyware as all of the possible combinations and, therefore, definitions can get very confusing and result in highly ambiguous statements which the author thought held a level of precision far greater than readers who come from different backgrounds might think.

 

To wit:  “free software” as in software that carries GPL affords the right to sell the software as long as the same liberty is passed to everyone else who can decide to sell it or give it away for free.  The many GNU/Linux distributions that are sold for a price remain free software as one who pays for it can give it away without cost, has the source code and can take the liberty to make changes (as long as they provide their altered  source code under the same license).  Stallman referred to this as “free as in freedom” which causes a problem for screen reader users as, by default, no screen reader will announce whether a word is capitalized or not so a layer of ambiguity is added to the word “freedom” as one can be left wondering whether the author meant freedom in the liberty sense of the word or if they mean Freedom as in Freedom Scientific, which led me to start describing such software as “free as in freedom with a lower case f” which is cumbersome and meaningless to anyone who is unaware of FS, JAWS and access technology in general.  Hence, libertyware.

 

The rats nest of definitions and terminology that surrounds the different licensing schemes outside of access technology and our added issue of distinguishing between software from FS and “free” software whether gratis or with the liberties afforded by the GPL and other similar licenses is difficult for all but the serious students of such who study the rather dry prose in these agreements and learn the details, nuanced as they may be, that distinguish one license from another.

 

For instance, the term “freeware” is often applied to software given away without cost but also without source code thus restricting the user’s ability to enhance, fix bugs or learn from the techniques used by the programmer who wrote it.  This is often referred to as “free as in free beer.”

 

Some software, typically found in third party libraries that developers use to perform some tasks where they have learned that it will be cheaper to buy than build include source code which, in a narrow definition of the term, can be called “open source.”  The people who buy the library do not, however, have the liberty to share the source code with others so a program can be open source without being free (in the sense of beer, in the sense of liberty or from Freedom Scientific).

 

Other programs can include source code, hence be open source, but not be libertyware as their license will include restrictions on how the software can be distributed and, in some cases, will permit the developers using the code to leave their changes out of future distributions and not, therefore, contribute to the community that built the source code upon which some of their program is based.  I’m not sure if such licensing schemes has a term to describe it.

 

So, for the purposes of this paragraph all uses of “free” is in the sense of as in freedom with a lower case f, we can have free software that is not open source, open source programs that are not free and software that is partially free.

 

I’m confident that if Stallman was here with me, we could think up a whole lot more complications that surround the terms “free” and “open source” so, today, (after bouncing the idea off of rms and receiving his blessing) I offer the word libertyware to mean software without restrictions, software covered by GPL and similar licenses like Mozilla and Apache.

 

Now, I guess I should go over to wikipedia and add the word there and hope it catches on as I’ve always wanted to be credited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the inventor of a word.

 

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Over the past few days I’ve read a bunch of misinformed blog posts regarding software patents and how they apply to the Freedom Scientific v. GW Micro case.  I hope, with this post to talk about the law and why it applies to this situation.

 

Note to readers:  I am not an attorney nor have I attended law school.  I have attended a number of seminars on software patents, user interface copyright and other IP law that surrounds the high technology industry.  Thus, I’m speaking from the view point of a well educated dilettante.  Also, way back in the eighties, I co-founded the League for Programming Freedom with my friend Richard Stallman.  Our purpose was to oppose user interface copyright (a case we won in a Supreme Court ruling in Lotus v. Borland) and software patents which a pair of Supreme Court decisions ended up with us losing that battle.

 

Judicial History on Software Patents

 

A long time ago, IBM filed a suit against the US Patent and Trademark Office.  They asserted that the work by Benoit Mandelbrot on fractal geometry and chaos theory should be granted a patent.  The court took the position offered by the PTO and ruled that all mathematics exist in nature and, therefore, can only be discovered and not invented.  Discoveries cannot be covered by patents.

 

Years later, AT&T filed a similar suit but, as evidence, brought the design for a bit of hardware that, while probably too complex to actually build, did describe a machine.  They claimed that software was merely an implementation of the machine and, therefore, covered by patent.  Our side (we filed an amicus brief signed by most of the most important contributors to computer science from Marvin Minsky to Rodney Brooks) used the IBM decision and added that all algorithms, all of software for that matter, could be expressed as a function of the lambda calculus, hence, it was an expression of mathematics and discovered rather than invented.  We didn’t believe this was an especially great argument but it was the best we had.

 

Thus, since the At&T case, software patents have been granted in abundance.

 

Freedom Scientific v. GW Micro

 

FS had a patent on placemarkers as a screen reading feature while using an Internet browser.  This patent was granted years before GW Micro decided to add the feature to Window-Eyes.

 

The GW Micro placemarker functionality contains a number of new and innovative features but, at its base, it starts by providing the same action as does the JAWS placemarker feature which, as one can find in a search of the USPTO  web site is pretty clearly described in the patent granted to Freedom Scientific that makes placemarkers in screen readers on the web their soul property for 17 years since the patent was issued.

 

Improvements to an invention covered by a patent held by FS or anyone else for that matter are called “derivative works” as they derive their basis from another invention.  So, in this case, it appears as though GW Micro (I say “appears” because I have not heard all of the evidence nor am I member of the jury) based its invention on the one in JAWS which probably means it is a derivative work and, therefore, is in violation of the FS patent.

 

In most industries, GW would file for a patent on its improvements and then try to negotiate a cross licensing agreement with FS so GW could use the base feature and FS could use the GW enhancements.  Unfortunately for GW, they published their beta before filing for a patent of any kind and, thus, created the published prior art for their own invention.

 

There are a number of arguments that GW can make in a court to defend themselves against FS but I cannot think of one that does not require removal of their placemarker feature from Window-Eyes.

 

Innovate, Don’t Litigate

 

By stating the above as clearly as I can, I must also say that I do not endorse Freedom Scientific’s behavior in this matter.  I agree with many of the other bloggers that the new Window-Eyes with its very cool scripting facility is a major step forward in screen reading technology. 

 

FS doesn’t advertise the patents it holds in JAWS anywhere in the product or package so GW could have unknowingly added the feature entirely without notice that FS had a patent on it.  In my opinion, FS should have sent a warning before filing a suit but I have not been on their executive staff for nearly four years so my opinions are meaningless regarding their strategy on all matters, including prosecution of patents.

 

But, as far as I can read it, FS has a very solid case and are well within their rights to protect their intellectual property.  Do I think this is ethical?  Well, as I helped organize the fight in the Supreme Court against AT&T, you can probably guess where my emotional side stands but emotions are worth caca in a patent dispute.

 

I hope this piece helps the community understand how this tricky bit of law works and why FS has a very legitimate claim – whether you and I like it or not.

 

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By Gonz Blinko

 

Samhara and I started packing up the house boat more than a month after we would usually leave the Glades.  We had some unfinished business in the area and managed to withstand the heat, humidity and the mosquitoes the size of Volkswagens.  Boris had left after a couple days (I’m not sure we could have taken him much longer anyway) and was camping out with El Negro up in South Beach.  All of us were preparing for the Outlaw Biker Race from Miami to Boston and BC was sponsoring our team.

 

“Hey Sam,” I called, “You gotta read this article in Diner Access Journal.”

 

“What’s it about?”

 

“A patent lawsuit, more your department than mine.”

 

“What’s it about?”

 

“Waffle House has filed suit against Denny’s over the ingredients in a newly designed and quite novel omelet recipe.”

 

“Huh?” asked Sam who I heard walking toward me.  “A patent over an omelet recipe?”

 

“Well, it also says something about improved placemats but as I haven’t eaten in either joint in about four years, I can’t really comment on either invention.”

 

Sam started reading aloud, “Waffle House got a patent on a five egg banana omelet served on an oversized plate with a special placemat.”

 

And?” I asked.

 

“I remember that filing, I think the patent looks pretty solid except in cases where the user prefers their eggs runny,”  she continued.  “Here’s a link to Denny’s response written by Douglas Giraffe himself.”

 

“What’s it say?”

 

“Giraffe claims that the new Denny’s five egg banana omelet also contains Philadelphia Cream Cheese, jalapeno peppers and a secret sauce only previously known to exist in Indiana.”

 

“Neither sounds too appetizing,” I added.

 

“Douglas also asserts that his five egg omelet is served on a square plate with an oval placemat which means it is entirely a new invention.”

 

“I haven’t looked at patent law since the old LPF days but this one looks kind of sticky.”

 

“I think the only sticky part comes in if you order either omelet with the optional maple syrup,” answered Samhara.

 

“Has anyone else chimed in?”  I asked.

 

“All of the usual folks in the diner blogosphere.”

 

“what are they saying?”

 

Sam paused for a moment to read a couple of other posts from members of the NFD (National Federation of Diners), ACD (American Counsel of Diners) and the official Diner’s Club blog.

 

“The response is mixed,” she said ponderously.  “The types who know patent law pretty well seem to go with Waffle House, the more emotional ones go with Denny’s and, the political types are saying things like innovate, don’t litigate.”

 

“But this case actually seems to cover a pair of innovations,” I said, “the original five egg banana omelet on the over sized plate and the special placemat sounds pretty unique to me.  I can’t think of any published prior art.”

 

“I’m not sure,” stated Sam, “Us law is based in first to invent but international patents go to the first to file.  I’m certain that Waffle House was first to file and I can’t think of a diner anywhere that served their special combination of eggs, bananas on an oversized plate.”

 

“But what of all of the extras Denny’s added?”  I asked.

 

“They might count for something, maybe they have enough novelty to be considered a different invention altogether.”

 

“What is Waffle House saying about all of this?”

 

“Their CEO asserts that they spend a lot of money on research and development and need to protect their costly inventions.”

 

“Typical,” I said.

 

“Omelet House made a statement claiming that they had the first five egg omelet but said that Waffle House pays them royalties on them and they admit they do not use bananas,” explained my African lawyer.

 

“What does BC say?”

 

“He’s been preparing for the race, I don’t think he’s paying attention to any of this.”

 

“Smart man,” I said, “enormous egg dishes with bananas fly in the face of sanity and BC has always been a bit on the edges of permanently crossing over into weirdsville.”

 

“Let’s get back to work and get our sweaty asses out of this jungle,” insisted Sam.

 

I had no way to argue so I continued our packing for our voyage north to the place where we store the house boat until next summer.

 

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            Over the past week or so, I’ve seen two announcements proclaiming new technologies for community driven projects to label non-compliant web sites that work poorly with screen readers.  Adding these to C-Saw from Serotek which has been around for years makes three systems that total to superfluous and counterproductive sectarian standards that should be harmonized as quickly as possible to provide the entire community with a unified database standard so, no matter the AT they choose, all will enjoy similar results.

 

As I mentioned the other day, Mike Calvo, CEO of Serotek, has offered C-Saw as an open standard to any team that wants to incorporate it gratis.  Similar facilities by IBM and WebVisum  only came to my attention over the past few days.  I understand entirely why user agents to access the database of label information will differ as each needs to fit with the paradigm of the specific screen reader. 

 

WebVisum is a Firefox plug-in and needs to conform to Firefox plug-in standards; System Access is a Windows screen reader that works best with Internet Explorer and, consequently, needs to be compliant with the rules that govern such.  All I know about the IBM analogue is that it works with JAWS and, therefore, needs to (at some level) fit into that model.  Knowing the IBM accessibility people pretty well, though, I would guess that it is designed for portability and will be offered to other projects as well.  I would also assume that Orca and VoiceOver on GNU/Linux and Macintosh could, if they chose, add functionality to access the same database as well.

 

Putting the obviously platform and technology specific user agents, in this case, any screen reader or web accessibility tool, which necessarily will have variations ranging from OS to browser to user interface paradigm, aside, we can now explore a harmonized database off in the cloud that shares all of the label information.  This will give everyone the head start of the more than 4000 web sites already labeled by the users of the screen reader formerly known as Freedom Box coupled with the new systems provided by IBM and WebVisum.  If the new systems don’t drop easily into other screen access utilities (Window-Eyes, HAL, NVDA, Thunder, etc.)  I doubt it will be too great a technological challenge to add the user agent side. 

 

If the people from WebVisum, IBM and Serotek can get together to discuss and ultimately create a common database standard, the data can sit off in the cloud not caring whether it’s a Mac running VoiceOver, a Windows box running NVDA or a Symbian handheld running Mobile Speak and all of the users will be able to contribute labels to pages that have none and enjoy the labels others have put in before them.

 

As, at the very least, the current WebVisum and probably the IBM systems are at least somewhat user agent agnostic, building a universal database and populating it with five years of Serotek data as a starting point can really start a fire.  Having four thousand pre-labeled sites will provide volunteers with immediate positive feedback that a community based system has been at least partially proven to work.  This added layer of usability will, in my opinion, provide added motivation and tear down some artificial boundaries between users of different screen reading technologies.

 

As, for all intents and purposes, the WebVisum Firefox plug-in works with the other AT out there, if it could harmonize its database with the one Serotek uses, the history of community involvement in labeling pages will be preserved and five (or more) years of Serotek users and volunteers won’t be lost.  I will assume the IBM system is similar and encourage them to join trilateral talks on bringing all three projects together.

 

A long time ago, I published an article to this blog about cooperation being the key to innovation, you can search for it in the box above, which proposed the hypothesis that, as regards underlying technology, AT vendors waste a ton of cycles reinventing the core technologies that occur in all such programs.  One reason JAWS has an enormous worldwide market share is not because it has a better off screen model or virtual buffer than the others but because it exposes a user interface to far more mainstream and obscure proprietary applications than do the others.   

 

If all screen readers and web access utilities start using a web labeling technology that shares a common database, those who provide the most comfortable user experience or invent a special way of delivering this content in a manner I cannot imagine at the moment, will win but all screen reader users, from those who cannot afford anything besides the no-cost and free solutions all the way up to the Ferrari programs can, as a single community, share a unified database. 

 

BC, as small a voice as we are, encourages Serotek, WebVisum and IBM to put their collective heads together (they all have some really smart people), perhaps invite people from NVDA, Apple and Sun and bang out a common database format for a set of labeling facilities, work together and take at least one step toward ending some of the counter-productive sectarianism that often causes people in this biz to reinvent the wheel.  I also want to emphasize that all parties to this discussion come with an open mind and be willing to make changes to their technology rather than letting their egos get the best of them – all of us are very proud of the work we do but, to build a community, we will occasionally need to put our pride aside and work toward the greater good.

 

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This past week, many of we so-called “AT experts received a terse email from a group we had never heard from before.  The contents of the email had so few facts and seemed so ambiguous that a bunch of us immediately thought it was some sort of spam/fishing scheme.  Then again, we wondered who would go through the trouble of finding top AT experts with widely read blogs just to hit us with some form of malware.  Sy T Greenbacks is a character I invented so he never does anything without me knowing about it in advance so I am aware of his evilocity well before he takes any such action.

 

Thus, after asking about it to some friends, I was pointed to Marco Zehe’s Accessibility Blog.  Marco is another FS refugee now with Mozilla and an undisputed expert in the field. 

 

The top article on Marco’s blog, entitled, “WebVisum Firefox extension” describes this new suite of tools by some visionary hackers.  I recommend that everyone interested in BC bookmark Marco’s blog as he publishes some of the best information in the biz.  

Quoting directly from Marco’s blog, “was posted to the mozilla.dev.accessibility newsgroup. The things talked about in this post and on the WebVisum homepage almost sound too good to be true. Among the features are:

 

• Ability to tag graphics, form fields, links, and other page elements. While some or all of these features have been available in some screen readers already, this feature is unique in that it works across platforms. It also sends the data back to the WebVisum web service so other members of the community can benefit from the labels someone provided.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to try and identify those images that absolutely won’t tell us through their SRC what they’re all about.
• Visual page enhancements such as a high-contrast profile.
• Suppression of automatic page refreshes or Flash content
• And most astonishingly: CAPTCHA solving!”

 

My only minor disagreement with Marco’s article is about the feature people can use to label and share information to give useful definition to the gibberish that causes such annoying noise on many web pages.  Serotek’s System Access (the screen reader formerly known as Freedom Box System access – is it a coincidence that Serotek and Prince are both based in Minneapolis?) has had its C-Saw feature that performs exactly this function by giving the users a tool to label these annoying elements and share the information with other users on the System Access Mobile Network.  Serotek has had this feature since they were just a tiny piece of the market but, over five years ago, Mike Calvo called me at my desk at FS to discuss opening this up as a standard that all AT could share – all of the established companies refused his offer which I believe still stands.  I think it would be an excellent step forward if Serotek and the WebVisum people could work together to harmonize their efforts as Serotek already has something like 4,000 sites labeled which will make for a great jumping off point.

 

I’ll skip over most of the other features as they are covered nicely in Marco’s article and move directly onto the plug-in’s ability to solve CAPTCHA (often called visual verification) which has been one of the greatest boundaries to Internet accessibility for a long time.

 

In my own testing and reports I’ve received in emails, users have been able to get beyond CAPTCHA on a panoply of sites.  These guys really nailed this feature; meanwhile, for a number of years now, the better established AT companies have ignored CAPTCHA as an unsolvable problem.  How then a handful of faceless hackers somewhere in the world (I couldn’t find geographical coordinates on their web site anywhere) beat all of the big dollar screen readers with one of the most important features added this century.  Simply put, the major players ignored the CAPCHA problem, told their users that it was impossible and the blind followed like sheep.

 

I have also felt a bit discouraged reading the blog posts by AT experts with vision impairment lately.  Simply reprinting an AT companies press release without any sort of analysis is something AT companies should buy as advertising from us blinks rather than expecting to get it for free.

 

Some of the well established screen readers have done some quite innovative things of late, not as cool as solving CAPTCHA but definitely worth mentioning.

 

The new model for distributing System Access at no cost via the virtualized web-based SATOGO program and on USB keys for students K-12 at no cost is beyond innovative and downright radical.  This remodeling of the AT pricing scenarios will bring AT to many people who couldn’t otherwise afford it.  Readers should check out the Serotek web site for details on these programs but as SA has matured into a real contender in the Windows screen reader market, using the no-cost web based version can replace the higher cost programs in many cases.

 

The other great development that has come out recently is the Window-Eyes scripting facility that uses COM and offers programmers a variety of languages in which they can extend WE.  This was not an easy task and as WE has, for years, advertised that no scripting was necessary, it demonstrated a level of courage by GW’s leaders to make the change.

 

Returning to CAPTCHA, though, why couldn’t the collective wisdom of the commercial AT companies come up with a solution that some guys with no background in the field managed to solve?  I’m not suggesting that the problem was easy but, paraphrasing Jack Kennedy, “we do not endeavor on these projects because they are easy, we do so because they are hard!”

 

Now I’m really looking forward to hearing what Darrell “Captain CAPTCHA” Shandrow has to say on the matter.  For years, he has been the most outspoken leader in our community regarding these road blocks to people with vision impairment effectively using the web.  I’m not sure that this new utility will be a silver bullet but it is certainly the greatest innovation this market has seen in a very, very long time.

 

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Forty eight years ago today, I entered the world in mid-afternoon, completely ruining my mother’s obstratrician’s holiday party somewhere in New Jersey.  I picture my slippery, sloppy infant self shooting out into a catcher’s mitt held by Yogi Berra who kept my mother, the doctor and nurses amused with his constant jawing about whatever entered the great ballplayer/philosopher’s mind.  With a puff of dirt as I hit the mitt, I, in my tiny way, had declared my own independence.

 

Today, the 232nd anniversary of our founding fathers declaring the independence of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, I sit in what was then a territory still owned by the Spanish who never tried to settle the place but, rather, exploit its natural resources,, torment and kill as many of its indigenous people as possible and, from time to time, head off on a mission to find the fountain of youth which would certainly be located in a place where the heat and humidity and bugs and dangerous animals ruled and people acted as bit players.  Sometime after actually gaining independence from England, the nation would purchase this god forsaken sandbar from Spain and send Andrew Jackson and his gang of genocidal maniacs into the territory to kill as many of the native people as possible because they were known to harbor escaped African slaves, a group to whom the independence from King George did not apply.

 

Women, white, black, native or European also got excluded by the independence movement and even incredible autodidacts like Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison who could counsel their husbands, presidents  of the nation on complex affairs but not vote to select their successors. 

 

Thus, Independence Day, for me, meant that I could survive as a being apart from my mother but it would take nearly 90 years to free the slaves and over a century after signing the document that suggested that all were created equal to permit women to vote.  The genocide of the native people continued into the twentieth century and some would contest that the poverty on the reservations and the ethnic cleansing they represent remains as a continued reminder if not an actual form of genocide.  Sure, the Seminole nation owns the Hard Rock casino chain but how does that compare to owning all of Florida, including all of that pricey waterfront real estate?

 

Someone I heard speak or read something by (probably Studds Terkel I think) made the assertion that, given the history of government from the ancients to today, the absolute rarity of a ruling body doing anything actually good for the population it dominates or any external people for that matter makes such events truly exceptional.  Thus, while the American style of representative republic has done many tragic things it has also taken a number of good actions which, for the most part, set it in its own category as, it has actually taken numerous actions in the name of a greater good than most, if any, governments in history.  Of this, we white Americans of European ancestry can be proud of our immigrant forefathers who elected governments that invented public education and, after a while, universal suffrage and even some degree of civil rights protections.  Some nations have done more but most have done far less so, even with the black eyes on our national integrity, we can claim a lot of good in our history.

 

For me, I am now 48 years old.  It's been 30 years since high school graduation and twenty-five years since the death of the cool – the end of the hardcore punk years and the start of my long journey into blindness, software development, access technology and all of the fun I’ve had doing all of that.

 

I will never be cool again.  Then again, how many people can really claim any part of the cool much after their twenties have ended?  Surely, Samuel L. Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis  and others of the “mega cool” can carry it for the rest of their lives and beyond; we mere mortals need to pass the baton to the next generation, move gradually into middle age, grey hair, pot bellies and memories of when we made the scene and, now and then, if we retain any morsel of the cool, listen to new music and perhaps actually go out to a club or larger performance space to hear a band that is not on a reunion tour or hasn’t simply continued into their geriatric years becoming less relevant with each boring new album and greatest hits tour.

 

Recently, I heard an interview with Winton suggesting that the whole world should have a funeral acknowledging the death of the cool as defined by Miles and the “Birth of the Cool” album released in the early fifties.  That album and attitude embodied by Miles, Monk, Trane and so many others of the era who acted with the nonchalance of an ice cube and, in attitude if nothing else, passed the behavior along into the hip of the sixties, the punk of the seventies, the grunge, alternative, hip-hop, rap, indie, you name it that has come since.  Winton suggested a funeral for the cool, a return to the chalance and permission to publicly show emotion, admiration and even joy and sadness in a public forum once again.

 

Thus, those of us who barely turned our heads when Lou Reed walked into a club where punks hung out, maybe tipped our beer in his direction might actually say that we admired his work, the Velvets and his influence on the New York scene that today can still be heard in the poetry of the Williamsburg hip-hop kids.  We can actually admit that Dylan, Springsteen and Motorhead made our blood rush with excitement rather than hanging in the back, leaning against the bar and saying, “they’re alright.” While inside feeling the rush of a great performance.  Those guys, the heavily influential acts, Iggy Pop, MC5, The Fugs, The Kinks, Rolling Stones, George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars deserved wild audiences but, alas, the cool got between us and our emotions. 

 

I suppose Lou Reed may have noticed that the early punks at least all did our best to dress like him – we had the biker jacket, the Ray ban Wayfarer sunglasses, the white t-shirt, the jeans with a hole in the knees and the Chuck Taylor high tops.  We were too cool to approach Lou to tell him we loved a particular performance but we turned into kinetic sculptures of the man, phenomena of which he must have been aware.  Notably, The Ramones, the first true break away punk band also donned this look.  Digging a little deeper, this was more or less what Springsteen wore.  Yes, we were highly informed by the previous generation but we punks wouldn’t admit it even if tortured.

 

So, I find myself agreeing with Winton.  It's time to bury the cool and move into some sort of twentieth first century non-nonchalance.  Will this be the post-post modernism the academics have been searching for?  Will we end up with a hyper generation of hero and ancestor worshipers digging through stacks of MP3 on their favorite download sites just so they can admire Blue Oyster Cult and Scorpions like we did?  Conversely, is trying to find an appropriate philosophical metaphor for pop culture a waste of useful brain power and that we should let it progress without social criticism or theory?  If I only had the answers to these weird questions about the peculiar things about which I think.

 

n  -End

 

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In the past week or so, I’ve received a number of phone calls from friends who are also experts in the screen reader segment of the AT market.  Some calls, from friends who work for GW Micro’s competitors told me about all of the security loopholes that are opened up with the new Window-Eyes scripting facility.

 

I then read up on the feature and agreed that, indeed, it did have some holes.  Last week, I posted a message to the blind programming mailing list which started out by celebrating all of the power that is now available in the Window-Eyes 7 beta and that I was excited to see what the community will make of this major advance in screen reader technology.

 

I also mentioned that there were some security issues in the feature that users should be aware of.  I overemphasized the security issues as the notion held center stage in my thoughts on the matter resulting from the calls I received from friends who work for GW competitors, definitely not an impartial group.

 

After posting the email to the BP list, I got some emails and phone calls from Window-Eyes aficionados, equally expert in the often nuanced ins and outs of the screen reader biz.  This group scolded me for bashing GW and felt that my email to the blind programming list was unfair.  After rereading my post, I agree with the Window-Eyes supporters, accept that I overstated the security problems and, with this post, I would like to retract my Chicken Little, “the sky is falling” statements.

 

The Window-Eyes people also reminded me that one can build some very nasty malware in JAWS scripts, especially if the interface DLL is used.  They are correct in this assertion and, once again, I’m eating a bit of crow as my email to the BP list was clearly unbalanced.

 

I do feel strongly that the new scripting facility in Window-Eyes is one of the coolest and most important steps forward in the screen reading business that we’ve seen in quite a long time.  People with the ability to program in a wide variety of languages can make some pretty amazing software using this model and I expect we’ll see an explosion of creativity from the community of users in the recent future.

 

Virtually every program that exposes a COM interface can now work reasonably well with Window-Eyes and programs like MS Project, dropped from the JAWS radar a number of years back, can be supported by the community and, therefore, more blinks will be able to get promotions into the jobs that require project management tools.  There are a ton of programs out there that a Window-Eyes hacker can really make sing in a manner that no screen reader could in the past.

 

I would like to recommend that as many WE extensions as possible be distributed under GPL or Mozilla or one of the other free software licenses and, of course, include source code.  As we learned above, all such scripting facilities can open security holes and, if we have the source code, we can ensure that none of the predatory sorts of software vandalism can be performed by said program.  Also, open source and free (as in freedom with a lower case “f”) software provides the community with the ability to control our own future and design our technological destiny rather than keeping it in the hands of sighted CEO types who report to sighted boards of directors who only seem to care about the profit line.  GW Micro, Serotek and the guys who make the iCon remain, as far as I can see, the most user centric companies in the biz and also deliver real innovation.  Humanware deserves an honorable mention for their recent book reading devices which are truly the bomb.

 

Finally, I haven’t worked for FS nor held an executive position in any AT company in nearly four years.  I work on some very cool projects for some very cool people but just because I was a VP of Software Engineering at the biggest screen reader company around doesn’t make my statements on any of this technology any more valuable than any other so-called expert.  Thus, if you read an email or blog post that I’ve written, please remember that I’m just one voice in a crowd and that you should read opposing opinions as, god knows, I’m wrong at least half of the time.

 

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Over the past few weeks and months, the AT family has lost a number of people who will be missed for a long time to come.

 

A couple of months back, Eric Damery lost his father.  Eric’s dad had a major influence in an entirely indirect manner on the history of access technology for people with vision impairment (PWVI).  He did not invent anything nor did he define new and exciting features; what he did was give us Eric Damery. 

 

Eric, already a resident of this part of Florida went to the Henter-Joyce office to buy a copy of OpenBook for his father.  While there, the HJ staff was so tiny that Ted handled the sale himself and then gave Eric a demo of JAWS (the DOS version back in the Paleolithic era of AT).  Eric was so enamored conceptually by the power of the screen reader that he practically camped out on the HJ doorstep until they hired him as their only full time sales person.  Eric then went to as many places that would have him, he would sleep on friend’s sofas or at the cheapest motels around.  Eric believed in the future of PWVI in the workplace and while competitors spent much less time educating the population, Eric went on a mission which resulted in a vastly greater acceptance of screen readers and PWVI in the workplace.

 

So, if Eric’s dad didn’t need a copy of OB, the zealousness and verve of Eric’s effort may never have been sparked and, observing the history of the industry, I cannot find another evangelist with so much energy and such a deep belief in the future of these products who would have picked up the ball the way Eric did.

 

Susan (my lovely wife) and I sent our condolences directly to Eric but everyone should remember that the kismet that caused an explosion in JAWS sales and a huge reduction in unemployment for we people with vision impairment was started by Eric’s dad who caused the dominos to start falling.  We all owe Eric’s dad and Eric himself a great debt of gratitude as, without them, the real advances in screen reading, mostly invented by HJ/FS may never have happened.

 

By now, most of us have heard of the death of GW Micro salesman Clarence Whaley.  Clarence was one of the real sweethearts of the access technology family.  With him, it was never about competition (which we all took seriously) but, rather, when off the clock, we were all buddies.  His charm and friendliness helped a lot of us lower our stress levels and enjoy the after hours times at many a conference.

 

 

Stephen Guerra, the commissioner of beep baseball and the greatest salesman at ILA lost his mother to a heart attack last week.  I don’t know anything about Stephen’s mom other than she raised a really terrific son and we at BC send our heartfelt condolences to Stephen and his family.

 

Peter Scialli, a founding employee of Benetech, home of Bookshare.org, also passed away last week.  About Peter, Jim Fruchterman wrote, “Peter's impact on the field of access technology for the blind was major. He moderated email lists, organized conference sessions (I particularly remember Dueling Scanners) and wrote articles for the journals in the field. Peter believed strongly in the power of technology to help people with disabilities, became an expert in the field and then committed himself to sharing that expertise widely.

 

His knowledge, sense of humor and dedication will be sorely missed.”

 

BlindConfidential sends its deepest condolences to all of the families of these dearly departed individuals.  If anyone has an address to send a contribution to a charity in memory of any of our recently departed please post it as a comment to the blog so we can send what we can afford.

 

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By Will Pearson

 

[Editor’s Note: Although the blog has been mostly writing for entertainment value lately, I still work in the field and enjoy hearing various theories about user interface.  Will is one of the most well studied in this field and one of its most insightful thinkers.]

 

I've recently found some time to continue with my work on simulating human visual attention using audition.  This involves using multimodal user interface
techniques to simulate or provide the characteristics of a particular human behaviour, which in this case is visual attention.  Working on simulating behaviour
has caused me to think about how the approach of providing accessibility by simulating behaviour differs from the current approach of treating accessibility
as a synonym for application compatibility. 

The main problem with taking the approach of treating accessibility as a synonym for app compat is that it turns accessibility into an infinite set of problems
with no end in sight.  Software developers are continuously producing new software products or modifying existing ones, and these have to be made to work
with assistive technology or vice versa.  So, accessibility becomes a continual problem and the only beneficiaries of this are members of the accessibility
industry as they are guaranteed a continual revenue stream. 

Providing accessibility by synthesising human behaviour has a significant advantage over the current approach of app compat.  Humans have a limited set
of behaviours that need to be synthesised, and this means that accessibility can be viewed as a finite set of problems.  Having a finite set means that
we can view accessibility as something that has an end point rather than something that is continuous.  If we can find ways to synthesise all of the behaviours
that a particular disability affects then we would find ourselves in a situation where everything was automatically accessible to people with that particular
disability.  Simply put, providing accessibility by synthesising behaviour makes complete accessibility an achievable goal rather than one we can never
achieve because to solve it requires that we solve a problem set of infinite size. 

Unfortunately, when talking about computer based accessibility we do need to retain the idea of app compat in one instance.  Assistive technology generally
acts as a translator that participates in the process of communication by translating between different types of sensory stimuli and or different lexicons
and sets of perceptual symbols.  Communication involves passing messages between different parties.  In the case of computer based assistive technology
the only party that the assistive technology really needs to communicate with is the operating system, and so the notion of app compat between assistive
technology and operating system will need to remain even if the view of accessibility changed so that accessibility was provided by synthesising behaviour;
however, if accessibility became a synonym for synthesising behaviour then we could eliminate app compat everywhere else. 

-- End

 

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“All we are saying is give peace a chance…” John and Yoko Lennon.

 

I gave Tebbers a boost up to the lowest branch and Red did the same for me as a line of young, mostly male punk rock looking types climbed a tree in Central Park.  On the distant stage, Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussein two of the world’s finest musicians played mournfully in the traditional sense of Indian classical music.

 

I sat beside Tebbers on a healthy feeling branch and we listened to the music quietly.  Red asked, “Is there room for three?”

 

“Probably but not safely,” I replied.

 

Red moved to the other side of the tree’s trunk and found a solid limb on which to sit comfortably and within chatting distance.

 

Tebbers looked around and started pointing in all directions.  Curious, I started looking at that which he found so interesting.  “Holy shit,” I mumbled.  Our tree grew out of Shepherd’s Lawn in the central part of Central Park.  People stood, sat, lay For as far as our eyes could see from our perch.  Later that night, Walter Cronkite would tell us that CBS estimated the crowd at 1.25 million, maybe more as it was too hard to determine how many people packed the side streets in upper Manhattan.

 

Ravi stood up from his sitar and, with his very recognizable accent, said a short prayer followed by, “God bless John Lennon.”  He and Hussein left the stage which we could see at a distance and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band set up as Alan Ginsburg read his requiem for the former Beatle.

 

The poet left and Bruce and Linda Rondstadt took hold of microphones and jumped straight into what I thought must have been the greatest version of “Devil in a Blue Dress” that I’d ever heard.  My memory jumbles up events from that era, did this incredible duet happen at the No Nukes rally lead by Nobel Peace Prize winner Helen Caldecott or did they play at the John Lennon Memorial service?  I know I sat beside Tebbers in trees at both events and can’t remember whether The Boss jammed out at which event or both.  I suppose some historian of the counter culture could tell you but I’m too lazy to even wikipedia it right now.

 

After the band left the stage, Yoko Ono, the grieving wife slowly approached the microphone.  Every night since her superstar husband took the bullets from the deranged Mark David Chapman’s gun, she passed through a crowd of hundreds if not thousands standing in front of her apartment building wanting to express their grief and support for this wonderful woman.  Rather than letting her body guard goons rush her inside, she stopped and thanked people for coming, for sharing her grief, for the rare occasion that a large group of New Yorkers would gather in a collective act of love.  Yoko refused autographs but gave me and others who asked a hug and helped many others wipe away tears.

 

On the stage in Central Park, Yoko spoke for about ten minutes pouring her heart out to what may have been the largest gathering of people in New York City for any reason at all.  Then she asked the crowd for five minutes of silence in memory of John.

 

More than a million people stood, sat, reclined or took a position that worked for them and said nothing.  No busses, sirens or automotive traffic could be heard.  A few birds cooed and chirped but they seemed confused at a large chunk of Manhattan falling silent. 

 

Nothing seemed real as we sat in a tree in a part of the park the city would later rename Strawberry Fields.  Five minutes of silence, interrupted occasionally by the hum of the engine on the Goodyear blimp while surrounded by more than a million people brings one’s mind to a place that even large doses of LSD 25 can’t reach.  The notion that we gathered out of love, peace, respect, honor made it all the more queer.

During those five minutes, if the sky had opened and John Lennon returned to his wife’s side, no one would have been surprised.  As the five minutes ended, the millions started, softly at first and then rising to a near deafening loudness sang “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” as Yoko cried silently on the stage.

 

-- End

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“New York, New York, It’s a hell of a town, The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground…”  Sung by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in the classic musical, “On the Town.”

 

I ran up the stairs in the Newark Railroad station, taking two at a time to get to the PATH train platform before the next train to mid town pulled out, which would have caused me to wait about fifteen minutes for my next chance to get to 9th St. where I would continue running to campus so as not to arrive too late for class.

 

I rammed my hard plastic Samsonite briefcase into the subway’s shutting doors and heard someone yell at me, “What are you?  A fucking retard?”  I didn’t waste my time with a response and started looking for something to hold onto.

 

The train lurched forward and I hadn’t taken my subway surfing stance yet.  I bumped into an attractive young woman who immediately called me, “Fucking pervert!”

 

The train took a hard turn and I crashed through someone’s Wall Street Journal.  “Fucking asshole punk!”  He said to me and I tried to right myself again.  I didn’t get my legs entirely until flying around, crashing and thrashing into other commuters.

 

When the train stopped at Christopher Street, I saw the first guy who called me a retard getting off.  I couldn’t hold back my NJ/NY attitude any longer and yelled, “See you later Frank!  Good luck beating that rape charge.”  People stared at him, a few laughed but most just let their mouths drop open.

 

Of course, planning my revenge distracted me from finding a strap to hang on and I didn’t get  into my surfing stance before the train leapt forward and, this time, I didn’t land on a relatively soft human but, rather, hit the floor pretty hard causing a lot of amusement for my fellow commuters. 

 

When we pulled into 9th St., I had already gotten up and, somewhat embarrassed at my demonstration of a lack of subway skills, I got off and started running to Washington Square.

 

Afterward

 

This is another entry for the daily exercises on the BSO writing club.  I banged it out pretty fast yesterday but hope you find it amusing.  To be upfront about everything, I stole the “Good luck on beating the rape charge…” line from David Sedaris, one of my very favorite writers who attributed it to his sister Amy.

 

 

 

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I just joined the writer’s club on “Friends of Bookshare” which posts a topic to write about for every day to keep us in practice.  Today’s story with the topic: Before I Was Born follows.

 

 

 

Before I was born, Kaye, my would be mother, said to Arnie, my future father, “Let’s have a baby.”  Arnie, a very nerdy chemist scratched his head and said, “Why not?”  So, after a few sessions of the old in-out, in-out one of Arnie’s sperms became friendly enough with one of Kaye’s eggs and they decided to fertilize.

 

At that point, Arnie and Kaye lived a pretty quiet life in Manville, New Jersey.  Arnie worked for American Cyanamid, a huge and environmentally disastrous chemical company who, in a big way, helped Jersey gain its reputation for poisonous rivers and amazing spectroscopic sunsets, and Kaye taught at a local grammar school.  On weekends, Arnie and Kaye would often go to Jersey City to visit one or both sets of their parents or into the Village to hear the beats read and the be-boppers jam.  Their life had few problems and even fewer fears.

 

Then, one day the sperm met the egg and they joined together to form a family which is how we became the BC bunch.  This didn’t occur immediately, the sperm and egg spent some time as a zygote and, for reasons of their own, caused Kaye to puke often.  After a while the sperm and egg decided to move into a bigger apartment and chose a fetus as their new home as such can easily support expansion. 

 

The fetus had all sorts of rapid additions grow forth from what once had just been a sperm and egg.  Loads of child, grandchild, great grandchild and beyond cells joined the fetus and, after a while, the fetus became me.

 

Arnie and Kaye felt a lot of excitement about becoming parents for the first time.  I, the fetus, didn’t much care about the future.  Arnie would say, “If the baby comes out as a girl, we should name her Audrey.”  At that point in his life, Arnie had a major league Audrey Hepburn fetish and often had to run off to masturbate when one of her movies would air on television.  Kaye didn’t like the name Audrey and replied, “No, we’ll call her Elizabeth,” the name my younger sister got six years later. 

 

When they discussed boy’s names, Kaye might suggest something like “Ignatz is a good name, we can name him after my uncle Ziggy.”  As I had no notion of the forthcoming David Bowie album that made Ziggy into a cool name, I would kick pretty hard at Kaye’s innards.  Arnie would say, “What about Christian,” a name I thought pretty cool and ultimately ended up with it attached to me.

 

For what seemed like an eternity in the warm dark place, I enjoyed sloshing around, kicking and punching for fun and to correct something Kaye might have said that disturbed me, especially when she would run down a list of extremely ethnic Polish names that I knew for certain would get my ass whooped at some point in the future.

 

Arnie and Kaye continued going to the nightclubs and visiting their parents but Kaye, for no reason apparent to me, stopped drinking the red wine that I so enjoyed.  After a while, the warm dark place started growing pretty dull.

 

On July 4, 1960, I ruined my mother’s doctor’s Independence Day Party by deciding to throw one of my own.  Dr. Dommer spent hours in the delivery room with Kaye trying to extract me from deep in the cavern in which I lived for my entire life.  Arnie paced back and forth in the waiting room smoking Marlboro cigarettes and looking like he had witnessed a train wreck.  Kaye pushed and pushed and, at last, I popped out and flew into the awaiting catcher’s mitt that they used to gather babies as the flew out of the shoot back in those days.

 

Dr. Dommer announced, “It’s a boy!”

 

“No shit,” I thought, “these big people have a solid grip on the obvious.)  Then, the bastard spanked me for reasons I still cannot understand, he was probably some sort of infantapheliac S&M pervert.

 

He handed me to Kaye and Arnie came into the room.  They had big smiles on their faces but I found the bright lights and noises quite annoying so I screamed for them to tone it down a bit but, not understanding the language of an infant, they kept making coo like sounds that one would ordinarily associate with a pigeon during mating season.  All I wanted was the lights turned down but everyone who could perform such a trick just smiled and made senseless noises at me.  Life hasn’t changed much since.

 

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Yesterday, Blind Confidential,, after posting 294 articles since we went online 2 years and 135 days ago, received visitor 500,000, a number that continues to grow.  I know that BC’s popularity among the community of people with vision impairment consistently grows but I’m not entirely sure why.  I enjoy writing the posts but BC hasn’t exactly informed too much in the past six months but, apparently, it has entertained.

 

For the most part, I have avoided writing about screen readers as my critics from two opposing camps either say I treat FS too kindly or that I write too favorably about JAWS and its fellow products.  I have found a few bugs in the latest JAWS update but reported them directly to FS and didn’t bring them up in a public forum.  I find that ignoring FS causes me much less anxiety than when I write about their successes and failures alike.  I still use JAWS 9.0.xxx on my XP machines but, by default, I use System Access on Vista.  I’m doing a lot of research into no cost and free screen readers for my job but still have little feel for that category of programs but will learn soon.

 

So, I suppose BC readers weren’t terribly compelled by stories about screen readers as they continued to read long after I stopped publishing stories about them.  I have written some items about AT products – mostly the Vic which I really love and hope others like too. 

 

I would like to make one suggestion about the Vic though.  Specifically, in the information that is read when one hits the zero key repeatedly, the Vic announces the time for the entire book and the time remaining.  I can not believe that it would be too difficult to add an option to speak the total and remaining time counts based upon one’s speech rate.  If I’m running at 300% normal, the time indicators  should be divided by 3 and, for example, be announced as, “time remaining 1 hour 24 minutes at the current speech rate.”  Knowing the amount of time remaining at the default rate is really not too useful unless that is the rate at which one is listening.

 

I get regular email from fans of the Gonz Blinko stories and may make an attempt to pull them together into a cohesive bit of fiction to be published on the oft promised but never actually existent hofstader.com web page.

 

I would like to thank all of the readers as I’m really blown away by thinking that a half million times my blog was visited by people who enjoy the dumping of the contents of my mind over morning coffee.  Maybe they don’t enjoy it but feel drawn to BC for some other reason but the hit count continues to grow.  Please keep visiting and I’ll keep writing and maybe it will all make sense someday.

 

I would like to thank certain people specifically.  Will Pearson has been a regular reader since day one and has provided us with some of our most insightful comments.  When Jamal Mazrui started his CSUN presentation by asking his dueling operating system contestants to sign up for our RSS feed, we enjoyed a spike in subscriptions and new readers.  Chairman Mal has provided us with our most entertaining comments providing laughter, fear and loathing in the way only a truly gonzo mind can do.  Joe Clark has provided us with serious issues to debate and has brought over a lot of readers from his blog to BC.  I really enjoy all of the private emails I get from people in the AT biz thanking me for making some ballsy statements about their employers, products or competitors.  Now that I’m out of the biz for nearly four years, I think and write about it less often and keep information leaked to me under my hat as I don’t need the aggravation, I’m a lazy slob…

 

I do find the growth of interest in and work going on in the free (as in freedom with a lower case “f”) segment of the AT world very interesting.  NVDA and FireVox, two programs I’m just now studying, have impressed me in a way that I haven’t felt too often in the recent history of AT software.  I love the free software, GPL model for this market as it provides the community with the liberty to invent our own technological destinies rather than relying on a hope and a prayer that a closed source and closed minded AT company will get around to fixing our favorite bugs, supporting the applications we need or want to use and creatively innovating into new areas discussed on this blog and others.  The Diaspora of blind hackers can, if we work together, create some tremendously cool stuff that would be cut out of a specification as too risky by the AT companies.  With NVDA and other programs, we have a good platform from which to launch what will be the next few generations of the AT we need.

 

Well, I’m off to get a yellow Labrador tattoo of the likeness of my guide dog on my left forearm.  I hope you have fun days as well.

 

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Our phone rang a few minutes ago.  As I sat next to a receiver I answered.  A young woman came on to inform me that my wife has a medical appointment with a “Doctor Smith” tomorrow at ten.

 

My initial thought, “Yeah, Doctor Smith, that’s your real name,” nearly came out of my mouth but this is the kinder, softer and gentler BC who still startles himself when he withholds a perfectly obnoxious comment.

 

I called Susan, my lovely wife, to the phone and then thought, “Hmm… Doctor Smith, ‘Warning, Warning, Will Robinson, Warning, Warning…” and thought of asking if he might have gotten himself lost in space at some point in his lifetime.  Then, based upon the sound of the receptionist’s voice, it occurred to me that our ages probably differ by about 25 years and that her birth may have happened after “Lost in Space” stopped running in reruns.

 

How many cultural cornerstones did I grow up with that people who have grown to adulthood have missed altogether?

 

Recently, on cable channels, Time/Life has been pushing the complete first season, including the rare color pilot of “Man From UNCLE” for a mere $29.95 if I act now.  Do younger adults have a clue as to how wonderful this show was back in its day?  What of the Avengers and its S&M overtones, did those reruns last long enough to inform and pervert this new group of adults?

 

Do these younger adults realize that Morticia Addams was, without a question, the sexiest woman in the history of television?  Do they understand that Eartha Kitt as Catwoman and Natasha Nogoodnik, a cartoon character, tied for second place?

 

Maybe Jeanie and the still beautiful Barbara Eden on “Love Boat” reruns may have sunk in as they seemed to be replayed for years.  Did Dawn Wells do anything in her post Gilligan years?  Her Mary Ann beat Daisy Duke hands down for the hottest butt in cut-offs.  Julie Newmar and Lee Merriweather the other Catwomen deserve a solid mention and Bat Girl, even though she appears in only a few episodes, taught us eight year olds the true meaning of serious leather.

 

Sure, Tuesday Weld tantalized as a good girl but it was the bad girls that caused that inexplicable feeling of warmth in our shorts.  I’m sure I’m missing quite a few from that era so please send in comments on your favorite hotties in television history.

 

To be fair, I’m a heterosexual male so my list is made up entirely of women.  The gay men and female readers should add male hotties as I never found Earnest Bourgnine nor Gomer Pyle terribly attractive.

 

-- End

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For what seemed like an eternity, the battle for mainstream software was fought over office suites and for primary AT over how well they supported office applications.  No major software vendor could not have a suite even if it comprised little more than a bunch of marginally related programs held together by a bungee cord.

 

Around 1994, Perfect Office from WordPerfect Corporation and Microsoft Office from MS dominated the market but Lotus SmartSuite: 1-2-3 for Windows, Ami, a weird word processor that didn’t understand the WYSIWYG concept terribly and some random and long forgotten database program that I can’t recall anyone actually using still had inroads into professional environments where 1-2-3 remained king.  Not to be outdone, Borland bundled Sprint, a really bad word processor, with Quatro Pro for Windows (which actually contained some code I wrote), Paradox and Sidekick for Windows which the Accessories that ship with Windows more or less obviated.  Another oddity involving Borland was that Quatro Pro and Paradox were also the spreadsheet and database in Perfect Office through their partnership with the WordPerfect guys.

 

Soon afterward, WordPerfect was, in what would be the largest acquisition of a private company up to that point in history, was purchased by Novell for $1.1 billion.  Novell knew a lot about selling complex networking systems to corporations but nothing about marketing works packages to end consumers.  A few years later, Novell would sell the WP division to Corel for $100 million.  I sent Bob Frankenberg, then CEO of Novel an email suggesting that the next time he wants to spend a net one billion dollars and get nothing in return that he should call me and I’d save him the headache of a lot of legal wrangling involved in such large transactions.  Bob didn’t reply.

 

Meanwhile, the Borland board of directors forced Philippe Kahn, the heart and soul of the company out of the business and PK went off and started Starfish Software which he would later sell to Motorola for a bundle of cash.  The new Borland leadership hadn’t a clue and, today, the company, after a few name changes, still exists and is called Borland again but no one can explain what they actually sell.

 

A little more than a decade later, the search engine has replaced the office suite as the top dog in the drive for dominance in the software world.  Google clearly leads the pack but, in Vista, it seems that I can’t hit a TAB or do much else without landing in something that will search my email, my desktop, my hard disks my documents (inside and out) and nearly everything else one might accidentally misplace. 

 

Searching the Internet is a really important task that grows more important as the web increases in content And complexity.  The sheer enormity of data on the web makes finding almost anything popular nearly impossible as one will get more hits than they could read in a lifetime.  Google seems to do a better job of this than anyone else but common search criteria, for instance, I searched for a friend of mine who is now a Catholic priest.  Have you any idea how many guys named Father Kelly live in or around the New York and Boston areas with their huge Irish immigrant populations?

 

All of the big players seen to think I need a search button bar or control in nearly everything I own.  Saving a new file in MS Word or, even worse, trying to open one, provides me with a bazillion search options.  I’m a really organized guy.  All of our PCs back up daily to our home server and the big back up disk backs up to another for redundancy sake.  I have loads of files and folders that I find easy to navigate and the files for which I want to read or edit at any given moment.  Does everyone else forget the names of their files and folders and just leave them strewn about their disks?

 

On the other side of the coin, while Microsoft tries to muscle its way into the search biz, Google is building an office suite.  Thus, we’ll have MS Office and MS Live Search plus Google Office and Google searches to help us find the things we misplaced on our local computers and home networks.

 

Competition is great but it also seems that MS and Google are trading blows in a manner that could be more innovative way.  Before MS got heavily into search utilities, they made a really good Office suite; before Google got into the office suite biz, they had a really great search facility.  Why don’t these very rich companies try to go out and build new technologies that are currently not served very well rather than trying to grab a piece of the other guy’s sandbox.  Go to the beach, there’s enough sand for everyone there.

 

n  End

 

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