As you know, Serotek is not a conventional assistive technology provider. In fact, we take pride in our willingness to think outside the box and leverage products that make a distinct mark on the customers we serve, but, the price of pulling away from the pack means succumbing to all manner of speculation perpetuated by competitors and by customers who rely on bias reviews to direct their own decisions. We have never shied away from defending our approach to development, and so following in that tradition, today we address a question that comes to our attention from time to time: Is System Access a full screen reader?
Well, to begin on common ground, let's first start by defining what a screen reader is. In the way of an impartial source, we can use the American Foundation of the Blind, which sets forth the following:
"Screen readers are software programs that allow blind or visually impaired users to read the text that is displayed on the computer screen with a speech synthesizer. A screen reader is the interface between the computer’s operating system, its applications, and the user. The user sends commands by pressing different combinations of keys on the computer keyboard to instruct the speech synthesizer what to say and to speak automatically when changes occur on the computer screen."[1]
Well, if we're going by these fundamental guidelines, then System Access is most certainly a full screen reader. Customers can install our product and interact with a growing number of popular applications that facilitate e-mail, word processing, web browsing and other key activities that are essential to daily tasks inside and outside of the office or classroom.
In its early days, it would have been fair to ask if our product could feasibly rise to the challenge of a traditional screen reader. Then again, we never promised more functionality than the product delivered. We understood that in its infancy, the product formerly known as Freedom Box that later included System Access 1.0 was a rudimentary solution with limited use of the off screen model to interact with applications, but even in 2002, many years after the birth of competing products, Freedom Box was hailed by the Teachers.Net Gazette as a product that "opened a new door for the blind and visually impaired, offering a new found freedom and a new kind of life."[2] That was high praise for a product that was so basic compared to the innovation we see today and when compared to the screen readers that had already been enjoying a prominent spotlight in the market.
There are at least three factors that feed people's hesitation to see System Access for what it is:
First, customers respond to marketing tactics that feed on human instinct. When you are sick, and when given a choice between the less expensive and the more expensive treatments, your instinct is to want the more expensive treatment because the higher cost must surely mean that the results are better. The same is true of technology. Accessibility concerns aside, you could buy the new Kindle Fire, or you could put down more money and buy the more expensive iPad because the majority says the latter outperforms the former. So it comes as no surprise that if competing screen readers cost $895 and $1,095, the experience must surely be sweeter. We often hear that not all is peace in paradise, but it's not our place to comment on other companies' ability to live up to expectations.
Second, there is a persistent view that a product cannot be considered a full screen reader if it does not allow for scripting. Such a view presumes that the absence of this feature was an oversight rather than an implementation by design. For the moment, Serotek does not buy into the practice of opening its product to scripting languages, and even if this were to change in the future, it would not be a dominant focus of our development.
To understand this aspect of our approach, it's important to recognize our distinction between user interface and user experience. User interface provides users with a core platform and enough tools to make that platform work for the specific needs of the end user. The manufacturer admits it does not know what the user might want to do with the product, so it provides scripting language support to help advanced users manipulate the platform to fit their needs. Such an approach is by no means a bad one, but it relies on users to devote many hours to learning the scripting language. It also sometimes requires many dollars to gain training if a consumer wants assistance with using the language to interact with and configure access to complex applications.
On the other hand, user experience boils down to nothing more complicated than creating a product that, to borrow Apple's philosophy, just works. Serotek has never claimed to outpace competing products on all fronts. We continue to cultivate a product that works very well for the most popular applications like ITunes, various e-mail clients, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome and a growing range of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. The scope of what System Access can deliver might be painted as limited, but limitations are only as concrete as the real world use of the consumer in question. System Access need not be configurable through scripting if the product is already delivering a solid experience for what it is advertised to accomplish.
Finally, Serotek has a specific customer in mind as it develops new products and services. We are thinking of the consumer who cannot afford to pay for competing products or for the software maintenance agreements to keep those products updated. Starting with monthly payment plans as little as $9.95 per month, System Access is priced well below other options on the market, and we are the only company with enough faith in the evolution of our product and it’s ability to continue to attract new customers to have eliminated software maintenance agreements. Our option is economical enough for people who are recent adopters of screen reading technology who need a straightforward introduction to assistive technology before plunging into murkier waters. It is an economical solution for people who believe in having easy to use yet powerful options instantly at hand.
We are also thinking of the consumer who enjoys the bells and whistles of competing products but require a consistent companion on hand when the competing product crashes or is unable to be installed due to lack of access to admin rights on the target machine. Nothing is more frustrating than encountering silence and having no way to get around it than to reboot the entire system to get things talking again. We would never suggest that System Access is without faults, but as far as offering an approach that delivers immediate and intuitive access, we stand by our commitment to make it work as easily and as consistently as possible. We are also the only company that has developed portable solutions that work under a minute on any PC you plug your thumb drive into with our product or access them via our Internet sites on any compatible version of Windows without the need for admin rights.
So, while we may not be the best choice for the software developer who requires specific tweaks to make her environment inhabitable, we are a perfect tool for the vast majority of users who want to take accessibility on the go and work anywhere, anytime, something best exhibited in the free service available on SAToGo.com. After all, why limit yourself to timed demonstrations when you could take our product for a more uninhibited test drive?
At Serotek, System Access provides a fundamental platform upon which our other services have been launched. We rolled out System Access during the days before we had options like NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA), and in fact, System Access might have never been born if NVDA had been an option back then. As things stood, the only choices were too expensive for a vast majority of blind consumers, and our commitment to making products as affordable as possible is as vigorous today as it was when we released our first beta.
So, is System Access a full screen reader? We believe in presenting you the evidence and letting you decide for yourself. Ultimately, the proof is in the performance and if the product works for your spasific applications. Right?
?
[1] Screen Readers. American Foundation of the Blind: Last accessed December 6, 2011
http://www.afb.org/prodbrowsecatresults.asp?catid=49
[2] The Freedom Box, Technology for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Melanson, Dave. Teachers.Net Gazette. Last accessed: December 6, 2011
http://teachers.net/gazette/OCT02/melanson.html
Showing posts with label disruptive technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disruptive technology. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Thank You Steve!
“If you live every day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right” Steve Jobs quoted an anonymous source in his speech to the Stanford graduating class in 2005. Yesterday was the day Steve was right and the world lost one of its true creative geniuses – a man who has changed each and every one of our lives in important and lasting ways. And not just with his disruptive products like the Mac and the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Those are some of his innovative tools but the real innovation was in how we relate to one another.
I imagine everyone recognizes that the way we interact has changed with iPhone and iPad. Steve gave us the gift of a great communication experience. For blind people, like myself, it is more than that. Steve Jobs opened that modern world fully to me and people like me by making the full experience of his products accessible, out of the box. He had the vision to see me as a customer who wanted to be treated like any other customer and gave me the privilege of walking in a store and paying retail for a product off the shelf that immediately gave me the same access and experience as any person with sight.
If the marketplace were a religion, as I guess it is for some, Steve Jobs deserves to be canonized, not just for his unbelievable marketing successes but for his wisdom and foresight to reach out to the whole market. I can assure you that blind people everywhere would pause before his statue and say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity we believe in for giving us Steve Jobs.
Steve used the quote above to talk about his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer which is what eventually claimed him six years later, but not until he had seen Apple for one brief shining moment rise to be the most valued company on the planet. Not bad for a guy who didn’t graduate from college and who, twenty-five years ago, was fired from Apple, the company he and Steve Wozniak founded. He talked about how dropping out of college and getting fired from Apple were some of the best things that happened to him, opening up new vistas and freeing him to pursue what he loved with the freshness of beginning anew.
It was an inspiring speech that spoke to my heart and I’m sure the hearts of every student sitting in that great outdoor coliseum. And maybe the most important thing he said was that “no one wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.” But he added that dying was one of the great gifts of life because it cleared out the old and made way for the new.
And now Steve has cleared out and that leaves us with the challenge of making new experiential products even better than the gifts Steve brought us. And as he said, there is no time to waste because our time to be “cleared out” will soon be upon us. They seem impossibly large shoes to fill and yet if we follow his guidance and “do what we love,” how can we fail?
Rest in peace Steve! You will be missed! All we can do now is try our best to keep your dream of a magical user experience alive.
I imagine everyone recognizes that the way we interact has changed with iPhone and iPad. Steve gave us the gift of a great communication experience. For blind people, like myself, it is more than that. Steve Jobs opened that modern world fully to me and people like me by making the full experience of his products accessible, out of the box. He had the vision to see me as a customer who wanted to be treated like any other customer and gave me the privilege of walking in a store and paying retail for a product off the shelf that immediately gave me the same access and experience as any person with sight.
If the marketplace were a religion, as I guess it is for some, Steve Jobs deserves to be canonized, not just for his unbelievable marketing successes but for his wisdom and foresight to reach out to the whole market. I can assure you that blind people everywhere would pause before his statue and say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity we believe in for giving us Steve Jobs.
Steve used the quote above to talk about his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer which is what eventually claimed him six years later, but not until he had seen Apple for one brief shining moment rise to be the most valued company on the planet. Not bad for a guy who didn’t graduate from college and who, twenty-five years ago, was fired from Apple, the company he and Steve Wozniak founded. He talked about how dropping out of college and getting fired from Apple were some of the best things that happened to him, opening up new vistas and freeing him to pursue what he loved with the freshness of beginning anew.
It was an inspiring speech that spoke to my heart and I’m sure the hearts of every student sitting in that great outdoor coliseum. And maybe the most important thing he said was that “no one wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.” But he added that dying was one of the great gifts of life because it cleared out the old and made way for the new.
And now Steve has cleared out and that leaves us with the challenge of making new experiential products even better than the gifts Steve brought us. And as he said, there is no time to waste because our time to be “cleared out” will soon be upon us. They seem impossibly large shoes to fill and yet if we follow his guidance and “do what we love,” how can we fail?
Rest in peace Steve! You will be missed! All we can do now is try our best to keep your dream of a magical user experience alive.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Cloudy With a Chance of Profit: Preview
I’ve spent a great deal of time publicly evangelizing the merits of cloud computing, both on this blog and on the Serotalk podcast. The next logical step was to expand, in the form of a book, on my experiences as an entrepreneur of a cloud-based business and share my thoughts on the effects of cloud computing on the information technology industry as a whole. Coming soon to your favorite bookstore is my first published work, entitled “Cloudy With a Chance of Profit: You, Me, And The Cloud That Binds us”. While you wait for the book to arrive, check out this exerpt.
What is the Cloud? More to the point: why should you care? It's something I would have asked back in 1997 when I first began using that new platform called Windows and the only clouds I knew were the ones from my cigars or the fog machines in the clubs where I worked as a DJ. Back then, the concept of cloud computing had not been conceived, but the Internet was causing a lot of excited noise about what this new type of communication would mean for people and businesses. I don't think even computer scientists had a clue of how the Worldwide Web would grow into the beast we see today.
Let me put it this way, the Cloud means to our generation what the telegraph meant to the world in the early 19th century. It changed communication. It changed how people viewed the world, and the great thing about inventions is that they build off each other until you sit back and think that things cannot possibly get any better. It's funny now to see that the car phone we once thought was so luxurious did not come close to the smartphones of today, but as you will read, the Cloud is so much more than point to point communication. It's a virtual playground, a global community, a new way of working and playing with friends and colleagues.
Writing this book brought back some interesting memories of the days when I was just getting started with Serotek. Those were the days when we felt good about renting enough servers to hold the work of the company in a safe location. We were proud when we had to rent more servers to keep up with the growth of our operations, but those were also the days when the difference between $100 and $1,000 to get the right hosting package would have been the difference between running with an idea and killing it. Now we're comfortably housed in the Cloud, and you know, I'm not even remotely kidding when I tell you that the sky is the limit.
But seriously, why should you care? In a world of bits and bytes, bandwidth and backups, you need to become a part of the technological evolution. You need to understand that the landscape is changing and there is more to the evolution than texts and Tweets. You cannot afford to be left behind when so much of the world is turning to the clouds to do business. Profit is as much about the funds you can generate from using cloud services as it is about the information you can use in the Cloud to build your personal human capital.
I am writing this book to you no matter where you sit. I am writing to the educator who wants to bring a whole new level of functionality to the classroom. I am writing to the person who just lost their job and is looking for a new source of income to survive. I am writing to the blind person who once had to pick living quarters conveniently located to public transportation, because before the Cloud, we were limited by physical time and distance. I am writing to the eager software developer who has yet to experience the beauty of choosing from a number of platforms to deploy your invention to the big blue sky of cloud possibilities. In short, I am writing to every consumer who wants to get in touch with their inner entrepreneur and act on that passion to make something happen.
The Cloud is an infinite frontier. That isn't to say that all clouds are built equally or that every cloud has a silver lining, but the potential is there. Speaking as someone who went from zero technology know-how to working my way through DOS and finally up to my current Cloud activity, I can tell you that it is not difficult. And it is not too late. I want you to put this book down having learned enough about the environment to proclaim that, you too, are ready to take on this ubiquitous thing we call the Cloud.
What is the Cloud? More to the point: why should you care? It's something I would have asked back in 1997 when I first began using that new platform called Windows and the only clouds I knew were the ones from my cigars or the fog machines in the clubs where I worked as a DJ. Back then, the concept of cloud computing had not been conceived, but the Internet was causing a lot of excited noise about what this new type of communication would mean for people and businesses. I don't think even computer scientists had a clue of how the Worldwide Web would grow into the beast we see today.
Let me put it this way, the Cloud means to our generation what the telegraph meant to the world in the early 19th century. It changed communication. It changed how people viewed the world, and the great thing about inventions is that they build off each other until you sit back and think that things cannot possibly get any better. It's funny now to see that the car phone we once thought was so luxurious did not come close to the smartphones of today, but as you will read, the Cloud is so much more than point to point communication. It's a virtual playground, a global community, a new way of working and playing with friends and colleagues.
Writing this book brought back some interesting memories of the days when I was just getting started with Serotek. Those were the days when we felt good about renting enough servers to hold the work of the company in a safe location. We were proud when we had to rent more servers to keep up with the growth of our operations, but those were also the days when the difference between $100 and $1,000 to get the right hosting package would have been the difference between running with an idea and killing it. Now we're comfortably housed in the Cloud, and you know, I'm not even remotely kidding when I tell you that the sky is the limit.
But seriously, why should you care? In a world of bits and bytes, bandwidth and backups, you need to become a part of the technological evolution. You need to understand that the landscape is changing and there is more to the evolution than texts and Tweets. You cannot afford to be left behind when so much of the world is turning to the clouds to do business. Profit is as much about the funds you can generate from using cloud services as it is about the information you can use in the Cloud to build your personal human capital.
I am writing this book to you no matter where you sit. I am writing to the educator who wants to bring a whole new level of functionality to the classroom. I am writing to the person who just lost their job and is looking for a new source of income to survive. I am writing to the blind person who once had to pick living quarters conveniently located to public transportation, because before the Cloud, we were limited by physical time and distance. I am writing to the eager software developer who has yet to experience the beauty of choosing from a number of platforms to deploy your invention to the big blue sky of cloud possibilities. In short, I am writing to every consumer who wants to get in touch with their inner entrepreneur and act on that passion to make something happen.
The Cloud is an infinite frontier. That isn't to say that all clouds are built equally or that every cloud has a silver lining, but the potential is there. Speaking as someone who went from zero technology know-how to working my way through DOS and finally up to my current Cloud activity, I can tell you that it is not difficult. And it is not too late. I want you to put this book down having learned enough about the environment to proclaim that, you too, are ready to take on this ubiquitous thing we call the Cloud.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Crowdsourcing as a software development tool
With the recent release of DocuScan Plus, the product development team would like to share with the community what we believe to be a new and exciting method of developing assistive technology. We feel that this tool is especially useful when developing assistive technology because of the unique challenges involved with creating this type of software. Assistive technology, unlike some other types of software, must be simultaneously easy enough for brand new computer user's to use, yet powerful enough to satisfy the needs of those with long term experience as well. In addition, developing a product that is so essential to so many people means that great care must be taken in every step of the design process.
How software is traditionally developed
The traditional method of software development is for a design team to generate specifications for a software product. After mapping as much of the product out as possible, including features, UI (which stands for user interface and defines how a user interacts with the software,) the overall capabilities of the software, pipe dreams, Et cetera, the design team hands these requirements off to the programmers. From this point forward, the programmers write the code using these specifications to construct the product. Once the programmers have completed their initial work, the product enters the "Alpha test phase", during which the product design team tests the software. If needed, they ask the programmers to make changes. Once Alpha testing is complete, potential end users are invited to play with the product. This phase is most commonly refered to as a beta test. Yet, at this stage, the feature set, software capabilities, user interface, Et cetera, is mostly frozen and very few, if any changes to these areas are made. Most of the time beta testing is used to eliminate bugs only.
The Serotek difference
All of us on the DocuScan Plus development team were very excited about this product. However, we knew that we were only a small segment of the population who would ultimately be using the product. We were determined to make the product as good as it could possibly be, not only for ourselves, but for the audience we wanted to serve. While we all had ideas on what we wanted the product to be, we decided that there was no better way to find out what the ideal document scanning solution should be like than to enlist the help of the people who would use the product the most. To do this, we knew we needed to go beyond the traditional model of software development. So, instead of bringing the users in on the traditional beta testing phase, we brought them in closer to the Alpha testing level.
The community difference
Unlike traditional beta testing, we decided that we would invite current owners of Document Scan to preview the new product. In exchange for their help with the development process, they were offered an introductory upgrade price. Over 20% of existing owners of Document Scan chose to participate in the preview. The interaction we had with this group was nothing short of amazing. We created a discussion forum in which preview users were asked to leave any feedback, ask questions, make suggestions, and report problems. As the development and testing phase moved forward, many of these suggestions were incorporated into the final product. In addition to the forum, weekly voice chats were held in order to allow more direct interaction within our community. Members of the Serotek staff including the lead programmer were present at these chats and in much the same fassion as the forum, these weekly discussions produced outstanding feedback and promoted great interaction both among the preview user's themselves and with the development team directly.
We have no doubt That DocuScan Plus is a far superior product because of the community involvement in the creation of the program. Many of the suggestions and ideas that were refined over the preview period greatly enhanced the usability, feature set, and quality of the end product. The DocuScan Plus team would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the preview users for their outstanding feedback and help making DocuScan Plus what it is today. It is truly remarkable to be part of such an awesome community. It is our hope that this type of software development, with an emphasis on community involvement, will serve as a blueprint to follow for future assistive technology products.
Monday, March 1, 2010
The Serotek Ultimatum
Serotek declares war on the traditional adaptive technology industry and their blind ghetto products. With this announcement we are sending out a call to arms to every blind person and every advocate for the blind to rise up and throw off the tyranny that has shaped our lives for the past two decades. It is a tyranny of good intentions – or at least what began as good intentions. But as the proverb says, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And for the past two decades the technologies originally conceived to give us freedom have been our shackles. They have kept us tied down to underperforming, obscenely expensive approaches that only a small percentage of blind people can afford or master. They have shackled us to government largess and the charity of strangers to pay for what few among us could afford on our own. And we have been sheep, lead down the path, bleating from time to time, but without the vision or the resources to stand up and demand our due.
That time is past.
We stand today on the very edge of universal accessibility. Mainstream products like the iPod, iPhone, and newly announced iPad are fully accessible out of the box. And they bring with them a wealth of highly desirable accessibility applications. The cost to blind people is exactly the same as the cost to sighted people. It’s the same equipment, the same software, the same functionality, and fully accessible.
What Apple has done, others are doing as well. The adaptive technology vendor who creates hardware and software that is intended only for blind folks, and then only if they are subsidized by the government, is a dinosaur. The asteroid has hit the earth, the dust cloud is ubiquitous, the dinosaur’s days are numbered.
But dinosaurs are huge, and their extinction does not happen overnight.. Even as they die, they spawn others like them (take the Intel Reader for example). Thank you, no. Any blind person can have full accessibility to any type of information without the high-cost, blind-ghetto gear. They can get it in the same products their sighted friends are buying. But let’s face it; if we keep buying that crap and keep besieging our visual resource center to buy that crap for us, the dinosaurs of the industry are going to keep making it. Their profit margins are very good indeed. And many have invested exactly none of that profit in creating the next generation of access technology, choosing instead to perpetuate the status quo. For instance, refreshable braille technology, arguably the most expensive blindness-specific(and to many very necessary) product has not changed significantly in 30 years. Yet, the cost remains out of reach for most blind people. Where's the innovation there? Why have companies not invested in cheaper, faster, smaller, and more efficient ways to make refreshable braille? Surely the piezoelectric braille cell is not the only way? And what about PC-based OCR software? It's still around a thousand dollars per license, yet core functionality hasn't changed much; sure, we get all sorts of features not at all related to reading, along with incremental accuracy improvements, but why are these prices not dropping either, especially when you consider that comparable off-the-shelf solutions like Abby Finereader can be had for as low as $79? ? And let's not forget the screen reader itself, the core technology that all of us need to access our computers in the first place. Do we see improvements, or just an attempt to mimic innovation with the addition of features which have nothing to do with the actual reading of the screen, while maintaining the same ridiculous price point.
This maintaining of the status quo will, inevitably, face an enormous crash, worse than the transition from DOS to Windows based accessibility. You can expect a technology crash that will put users of the most expensive accessibility gear out of business.
Why? I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but the basic story is that some of these products have been kept current with patches and fixes and partial rewrites and other tricks we IT types use when we haven’t got the budget to do it right, but we need to make the product work with the latest operating system. That process of patching and fixing creates an enormous legacy barrier that makes it impossible to rewrite without abandoning all who came before. But you can only keep a kluge working for so long before it will crumble under its own weight. That, my friends, is exactly where some of the leading adaptive technology vendors find themselves today.
There are exceptions. Serotek is an exception because we have completely recreated our product base every three years. GW Micro is an exception because they built their product in a highly modular fashion and can update modules without destroying the whole. KNFB is an exception because they take advantage of off-the-shelf technologies, which translate ultimately into price drops and increased functionality.
But even we who have done it right are on a path to obsolescence. The fundamental need for accessibility software is rapidly beginning to vanish. The universal accessibility principles we see Apple, Microsoft, Olympus, and others putting in place are going to eliminate the need for these specialty products in a matter of just a very few years.
Stop and think. Why do you need accessibility tools? To read text? E-book devices are eliminating that need. None of them are perfect yet, but we are really only in the first generation. By Gen2 they will all be fully accessible. To find your way? GPS on your iPhone or your Android based phone will do that for you. To take notes? Easy on any laptop, netbook, or iPad. Heck, you can record it live and play it back at your convenience. Just what isn’t accessible? You can play your music, catch a described video, scan a spreadsheet, take in a PowerPoint presentation – all using conventional, off-the-shelf systems and/or software that is free of charge.
There are still some legacy situations where you need to create an accessibility path. Some corporations still have internal applications that do not lend themselves to modern devices. There will certainly be situations where a specialized product will better solve an accessibility problem than a mainstream one, especially in the short term. We don't advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but we do advocate that we begin to hasten the inevitable change by using accessible mainstream solutions wherever possible. Even now, the leading edge companies are reinventing their internal systems with accessibility as a design criteria, so the situations that require specialized products will certainly become fewer as time goes on.
If our current Assistive technology guard's reign is coming to an end, why the war? Why not just let it die its own, natural, inevitable death? Because nothing dies more slowly than an obsolete technology. Punch cards hung on for twenty or thirty years after they were completely obsolete. The same is true for magnetic tape. Old stuff represents a comparatively large investment, and people hate to throw away something they paid a lot of money for even if it’s currently worthless. But that legacy stuff obscures the capabilities of the present. It gets used in situations where other solutions are cheaper and more practical. The legacy stuff clogs the vocational rehab channel, eating up the lion’s share of the resources but serving a tiny portion of the need. It gets grandfathered into contracts. It gets specified when there is no earthly reason why the application requires it. The legacy stuff slows down the dawning of a fully accessible world.
It hurts you and it hurts me.
To be sure, I make my living creating and selling products that make our world accessible. But first and foremost, I am a blind person. I am one of you. And every day I face the same accessibility challenges you face. I have dedicated my life and my company to making the world more accessible for all of us, but I can’t do it alone. This is a challenge that every blind person needs to take up. We need to shout from the rooftops: “Enough!”
We need to commit ourselves in each and every situation to finding and using the most accessible off the shelf tool and/or the least-cost, highest function accessibility tool available. With our dollars and our commitment to making known that our needs and the needs of sighted people are 99% the same, we can reshape this marketplace. We can drive the dinosaurs into the tar pits and nurture those cute fuzzy little varmints that are ancestors to the next generation. We can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
And all it takes is getting the best possible solution for your specific need. Once you have found the solution to fill that need, let the company know you appreciate their work towards better accessibility. Let your friends (sighted and blind) know about these accessibility features; they probably don't know that such features exist.
Make your needs known to the vocational rehab people you are working with, and don’t allow them to make recommendations for a specific technology for no other reason than that it’s been in the contract for years. Make sure your schools and your workplace understand the need to push technology in to the accessible space. Show them the low-cost alternatives. In this economy some, the intelligent ones, will get it and the tide will begin to turn.
And then in short order the tsunami of good sense will wash away the old, and give us the space to build a more accessible world for all of us. Let the demand ring out loud and clear and the market will follow.
If this message rings true to you, don’t just shake your fist in agreement and leave it at that. let your voice be heard! Arm yourself with the vision of a future where there are no social, conceptual, or economic barriers to accessibility, and let your words and your actions demonstrate that you will not rest until that vision is realized. Take out your wallet and let your consumer power shine! You do mater as a market people! You have kept this company alive with your money for 8 years this month! I believe that if we all get together and do our part, we will finally say “NO more!” same old same old! Join the revolution! Together we can change the world!
That time is past.
We stand today on the very edge of universal accessibility. Mainstream products like the iPod, iPhone, and newly announced iPad are fully accessible out of the box. And they bring with them a wealth of highly desirable accessibility applications. The cost to blind people is exactly the same as the cost to sighted people. It’s the same equipment, the same software, the same functionality, and fully accessible.
What Apple has done, others are doing as well. The adaptive technology vendor who creates hardware and software that is intended only for blind folks, and then only if they are subsidized by the government, is a dinosaur. The asteroid has hit the earth, the dust cloud is ubiquitous, the dinosaur’s days are numbered.
But dinosaurs are huge, and their extinction does not happen overnight.. Even as they die, they spawn others like them (take the Intel Reader for example). Thank you, no. Any blind person can have full accessibility to any type of information without the high-cost, blind-ghetto gear. They can get it in the same products their sighted friends are buying. But let’s face it; if we keep buying that crap and keep besieging our visual resource center to buy that crap for us, the dinosaurs of the industry are going to keep making it. Their profit margins are very good indeed. And many have invested exactly none of that profit in creating the next generation of access technology, choosing instead to perpetuate the status quo. For instance, refreshable braille technology, arguably the most expensive blindness-specific(and to many very necessary) product has not changed significantly in 30 years. Yet, the cost remains out of reach for most blind people. Where's the innovation there? Why have companies not invested in cheaper, faster, smaller, and more efficient ways to make refreshable braille? Surely the piezoelectric braille cell is not the only way? And what about PC-based OCR software? It's still around a thousand dollars per license, yet core functionality hasn't changed much; sure, we get all sorts of features not at all related to reading, along with incremental accuracy improvements, but why are these prices not dropping either, especially when you consider that comparable off-the-shelf solutions like Abby Finereader can be had for as low as $79? ? And let's not forget the screen reader itself, the core technology that all of us need to access our computers in the first place. Do we see improvements, or just an attempt to mimic innovation with the addition of features which have nothing to do with the actual reading of the screen, while maintaining the same ridiculous price point.
This maintaining of the status quo will, inevitably, face an enormous crash, worse than the transition from DOS to Windows based accessibility. You can expect a technology crash that will put users of the most expensive accessibility gear out of business.
Why? I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but the basic story is that some of these products have been kept current with patches and fixes and partial rewrites and other tricks we IT types use when we haven’t got the budget to do it right, but we need to make the product work with the latest operating system. That process of patching and fixing creates an enormous legacy barrier that makes it impossible to rewrite without abandoning all who came before. But you can only keep a kluge working for so long before it will crumble under its own weight. That, my friends, is exactly where some of the leading adaptive technology vendors find themselves today.
There are exceptions. Serotek is an exception because we have completely recreated our product base every three years. GW Micro is an exception because they built their product in a highly modular fashion and can update modules without destroying the whole. KNFB is an exception because they take advantage of off-the-shelf technologies, which translate ultimately into price drops and increased functionality.
But even we who have done it right are on a path to obsolescence. The fundamental need for accessibility software is rapidly beginning to vanish. The universal accessibility principles we see Apple, Microsoft, Olympus, and others putting in place are going to eliminate the need for these specialty products in a matter of just a very few years.
Stop and think. Why do you need accessibility tools? To read text? E-book devices are eliminating that need. None of them are perfect yet, but we are really only in the first generation. By Gen2 they will all be fully accessible. To find your way? GPS on your iPhone or your Android based phone will do that for you. To take notes? Easy on any laptop, netbook, or iPad. Heck, you can record it live and play it back at your convenience. Just what isn’t accessible? You can play your music, catch a described video, scan a spreadsheet, take in a PowerPoint presentation – all using conventional, off-the-shelf systems and/or software that is free of charge.
There are still some legacy situations where you need to create an accessibility path. Some corporations still have internal applications that do not lend themselves to modern devices. There will certainly be situations where a specialized product will better solve an accessibility problem than a mainstream one, especially in the short term. We don't advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but we do advocate that we begin to hasten the inevitable change by using accessible mainstream solutions wherever possible. Even now, the leading edge companies are reinventing their internal systems with accessibility as a design criteria, so the situations that require specialized products will certainly become fewer as time goes on.
If our current Assistive technology guard's reign is coming to an end, why the war? Why not just let it die its own, natural, inevitable death? Because nothing dies more slowly than an obsolete technology. Punch cards hung on for twenty or thirty years after they were completely obsolete. The same is true for magnetic tape. Old stuff represents a comparatively large investment, and people hate to throw away something they paid a lot of money for even if it’s currently worthless. But that legacy stuff obscures the capabilities of the present. It gets used in situations where other solutions are cheaper and more practical. The legacy stuff clogs the vocational rehab channel, eating up the lion’s share of the resources but serving a tiny portion of the need. It gets grandfathered into contracts. It gets specified when there is no earthly reason why the application requires it. The legacy stuff slows down the dawning of a fully accessible world.
It hurts you and it hurts me.
To be sure, I make my living creating and selling products that make our world accessible. But first and foremost, I am a blind person. I am one of you. And every day I face the same accessibility challenges you face. I have dedicated my life and my company to making the world more accessible for all of us, but I can’t do it alone. This is a challenge that every blind person needs to take up. We need to shout from the rooftops: “Enough!”
We need to commit ourselves in each and every situation to finding and using the most accessible off the shelf tool and/or the least-cost, highest function accessibility tool available. With our dollars and our commitment to making known that our needs and the needs of sighted people are 99% the same, we can reshape this marketplace. We can drive the dinosaurs into the tar pits and nurture those cute fuzzy little varmints that are ancestors to the next generation. We can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
And all it takes is getting the best possible solution for your specific need. Once you have found the solution to fill that need, let the company know you appreciate their work towards better accessibility. Let your friends (sighted and blind) know about these accessibility features; they probably don't know that such features exist.
Make your needs known to the vocational rehab people you are working with, and don’t allow them to make recommendations for a specific technology for no other reason than that it’s been in the contract for years. Make sure your schools and your workplace understand the need to push technology in to the accessible space. Show them the low-cost alternatives. In this economy some, the intelligent ones, will get it and the tide will begin to turn.
And then in short order the tsunami of good sense will wash away the old, and give us the space to build a more accessible world for all of us. Let the demand ring out loud and clear and the market will follow.
If this message rings true to you, don’t just shake your fist in agreement and leave it at that. let your voice be heard! Arm yourself with the vision of a future where there are no social, conceptual, or economic barriers to accessibility, and let your words and your actions demonstrate that you will not rest until that vision is realized. Take out your wallet and let your consumer power shine! You do mater as a market people! You have kept this company alive with your money for 8 years this month! I believe that if we all get together and do our part, we will finally say “NO more!” same old same old! Join the revolution! Together we can change the world!
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Serotek Story Documentary A Must For your Audio Archive
I don’t usually post things from the Serotalk Podcast here, but, The Serotek Story Documentary is so compelling that I figured I would post it. Of course I’m biased!
If you haven’t put the Serotalk Podcast on your RSS, shame on you! LOL! Really though, it is a great resource for information on what’s happening in the World of technology according to a few blind and rather disturbed geeks! So, if you’d like a few laughs and some pretty good information head over to the Serotalk Podcast! And hey, you might not even be sorry you did!
Happy New Year!
If you haven’t put the Serotalk Podcast on your RSS, shame on you! LOL! Really though, it is a great resource for information on what’s happening in the World of technology according to a few blind and rather disturbed geeks! So, if you’d like a few laughs and some pretty good information head over to the Serotalk Podcast! And hey, you might not even be sorry you did!
Happy New Year!
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Who Says? You Can't Build It and They Will Come
Knowbility blogger Desiree at Universally Designed gives us a wonderful tutorial in Webinars in her September 2nd posting along with an introduction to Serotek’s Accessible Event, which makes this phenomenally useful tool completely accessible to the blind, deaf, and deaf-blind. Desiree gives our AE team a lot of well-deserved pats on the back. That’s the way it should be because our people are out there changing the world, one demonstration at a time. Once again Serotek has blasted the barriers and brings the latest in social networking technology to everyone.
I call Accessible Event a social networking tool because online meetings are really a dimension of social networking. The one-on-one stuff is great and we make that available in many different ways, but some information is best provided to a group, all at the same time. That includes corporate meetings, webinars, university classes, sermons and presentations of many kinds – really any time one person or a group of people play show and tell to a larger group in real time. Thanks to the Internet and tools like GoToMeetinghttps://www1.gotomeeting.com/?Portal=www.gotomeeting.com and WebEx virtual meetings or webinars have been with us for a while now. But, as Desiree pointed out, the blind were not invited to be full participants. And neither were the deaf and deaf-blind.
Serotek changed that. We did it in a way that is very low cost and absolutely easy to use. We brought in the deaf and deaf-blind with closed caption capability and Braille interface. There is really no excuse now for any organization to offer a Webinar or even a presentation in an auditorium and not include full participation for the blind, deaf, and deaf-blind.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is what we do best. Make the world accessible with little or no hassle. We provide the accessibility tools people need to fully participate in today’s society. We make them easy to use and easy to own. We don’t wrap people up in expensive maintenance agreements or force them to own only our software in order to take advantage of the accessibility. AE, for example, works with any screen reader. And, of course, you don’t even need to purchase a screen reader for online use. System Access To Go is available free of charge to anyone.
When ADA was enacted there was always the built-in excuse that it was too costly or difficult to make certain activities accessible. Unfortunately, before we came on the scene, the Adaptive Technology Industry seemed to be doing its best to prove the ADA backsliders’ point. Serotek’s mission is to eliminate that excuse and with Accessible Event we’ve virtually eliminated it from presentations, online meetings and forums.
So speak up. If you are attending classes, webinars, going to meetings, or otherwise involved in presentations that are not fully accessible to you, it’s time to demand your rights. Any organization or individual can use AE at very little cost. The tools are available to tear down the barriers to accessibility, but only you can demand the people you deal with use those tools. Accessibility really begins with you demanding your right to it.
I call Accessible Event a social networking tool because online meetings are really a dimension of social networking. The one-on-one stuff is great and we make that available in many different ways, but some information is best provided to a group, all at the same time. That includes corporate meetings, webinars, university classes, sermons and presentations of many kinds – really any time one person or a group of people play show and tell to a larger group in real time. Thanks to the Internet and tools like GoToMeetinghttps://www1.gotomeeting.com/?Portal=www.gotomeeting.com and WebEx virtual meetings or webinars have been with us for a while now. But, as Desiree pointed out, the blind were not invited to be full participants. And neither were the deaf and deaf-blind.
Serotek changed that. We did it in a way that is very low cost and absolutely easy to use. We brought in the deaf and deaf-blind with closed caption capability and Braille interface. There is really no excuse now for any organization to offer a Webinar or even a presentation in an auditorium and not include full participation for the blind, deaf, and deaf-blind.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is what we do best. Make the world accessible with little or no hassle. We provide the accessibility tools people need to fully participate in today’s society. We make them easy to use and easy to own. We don’t wrap people up in expensive maintenance agreements or force them to own only our software in order to take advantage of the accessibility. AE, for example, works with any screen reader. And, of course, you don’t even need to purchase a screen reader for online use. System Access To Go is available free of charge to anyone.
When ADA was enacted there was always the built-in excuse that it was too costly or difficult to make certain activities accessible. Unfortunately, before we came on the scene, the Adaptive Technology Industry seemed to be doing its best to prove the ADA backsliders’ point. Serotek’s mission is to eliminate that excuse and with Accessible Event we’ve virtually eliminated it from presentations, online meetings and forums.
So speak up. If you are attending classes, webinars, going to meetings, or otherwise involved in presentations that are not fully accessible to you, it’s time to demand your rights. Any organization or individual can use AE at very little cost. The tools are available to tear down the barriers to accessibility, but only you can demand the people you deal with use those tools. Accessibility really begins with you demanding your right to it.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Serotek And It's Disruptive Technologies
Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christiansen recently wrote an article for Technology Review outlining the Rules for Innovation. Mr. Christiansen contends that bringing innovation to market is far less of a crap-shoot than venture capitalists pretend. In fact, he outlines a handful of conditions which almost guarantee success. His rules are:
- Take root in disruption
- Have the necessary scope to succeed
- Leverage the right capabilities
- And disrupt competitors, not customers.
We looked at Serotek’s products in the light of Mr. Christiansen’s rules and by any measure we are on track for success.
I would like to give you a brief tour of Serotek’s products and compare them to the factors Mr. Christiansen has identified in his research as absolute characteristics of innovation success.
Taking Root in Disruption
What does this mean? The premise is relatively simple. Companies that are leaders in their markets are almost never the innovators of the next technological revolution. This happens because they are well managed and listen to their customers who always tell them that they want better and less expensive versions of what they are currently selling. Thus these market leaders will continue to produce the best in their specific market niche but they will miss entirely the next technological wave which will sweep in from an unsuspected direction and overwhelm the old way of approaching the problem. Nowhere is this more evident than in computers with their successive waves of mainframes, minis, and personal computers . Each new wave represented a major degradation in functionality, but brought that functionality to a previously unserved or underserved market. Once it had taken hold, each wave gradually overwhelmed the prior markets in a grassroots revolution.
The attributes of disruptive technologies are:
- Simplicity
- Convenience
- Low cost
They appeal to a market generally considered too small to be of interest to the mainstream players. The two tests for whether a product is disruptive are:
Does it enable less-skilled, less-wealthy customers to do for themselves things that only the wealthy or skilled intermediaries could previously do?
Does it target customers at the low end who don’t necessarily need all of the functionality of current products?
Clearly Serotek’s products pass these two tests with flying colors. Our user interface and intuitive level of interaction allow people with little or no training and no previous computer experience and with significant physical impairments including blindness and other manual dexterity challenges to access computers. Our target market, the blind and the elderly, are most interested in the Internet fundamentals - e-mail, shopping, chat rooms, entertainment, and information. There is enormous new value to these people by having any access at all. And, generally speaking, our market has been ignored by current vendors as not representing an important economic demographic.
Furthermore, our business model allows us to earn very attractive returns serving our chosen market. We have created an extremely successful business focused only on this low-end, relatively ignored market segment and now, tier by tier we are bringing our innovations to other market segments (such as students and professionals) without losing ease of use.
The Scope to Succeed
Christiansen discusses two technological paths to success: the integrated path where companies sell their proprietary components and products across a wide range of product lines and businesses; and the non-integrated strategy where companies outsource as much as possible, promote industry standards, and use modular, open systems and components. He claims that the integrated strategy is essential where product functionality is not yet good enough and enormous advantage is gained by creating architectures that push the state of the art based on proprietary technology. The open architecture strategy fits the marketplace Serotek’s products find themselves in.
Simplicity, convenience, and speed to market dominate. Powerful technologies have been developed by mainstream companies like U3, Microsoft, and other technologies, including open source, used in our products, that can be adapted easily to our niche market. At the same time, our proprietary backbone architecture, with our patentable core technologies, give us a sustainable advantage over others who might enter this market. In essence, we have the best of three worlds. Our proprietary technologies conform to key industry standards and allow us to integrate leading-edge components and bring a highly functional product to market fast.
Leveraging the Right Capabilities
Christiansen claims that innovations fail when managers attempt to implement them in organizations that are incapable of succeeding. Three factors determine an organization’s innovation limits:
- Resources to succeed
- Processes that facilitate success
- Values that allow employees to give this innovation the attention it needs to succeed
The limits are surprising. Resources are management and money, but oddly enough, proven managers and lots of money are not ingredients to drive innovation. Proven managers tend to go with what has worked before, assuming that new markets will behave in the same fashion as stable markets. But that is rarely the case. New or evolving markets need new thinking. Too much money allows ventures to follow a flawed strategy too long. For example, many over-funded companies during the dot-com bubble valued advertisers above users. Having to scrape by forces the venture to adapt to the desires of actual customers. Looking for customer revenue to fund operations and development forces the venture to uncover viable strategies quickly. Too much money encourages impatience for growth and too much patience for profits. Cash-rich companies tend to take huge gambles before the right strategy can be known. A better, surer path to a solid company is to be patient for growth and impatient for profits.
The Serotek team brings together entrepreneurs and technologists who have a passion for serving this market. The leaders are blind and understand the characteristics of serving this market. They have dealt first-hand with the barriers that vision-impaired people face trying to use computers and the Internet and the huge learning investment required to become skilled in conventional assistive technology.
The company was built using a bootstrap economic model. Every possible administrative function is outsourced and automated. The company carries minimal overhead but can bring the resources together to serve demand. It is completely scalable, able to grow as demand grows, yet has been able to survive through the cash-lean start-up period.
Process can be a barrier. Good processes are essential to established companies serving stable markets. They allow continued improvements in quality and efficiency. But processes are inflexible. Innovation demands flexibility. Thus a start-up company like Serotek has an advantage over behemoth companies with rigid Six Sigma rules because it can shape itself to the needs of its market segments.
Values can be the third barrier. Existing companies have existing value networks with rigid expectations and rewards based on the type of business that has traditionally brought success. Values are even more rigid than processes and thus disruptive innovations have little chance of being given the priority they need to develop and flourish. Serotek’s value system is completely focused on the success of Serotek's products.
Disrupt Competitors, Not Customers
The final success parameter is to help customers do things they want or have been trying to do; don’t make them relearn how to do things they can already do. And don’t bother making it easy for them to do things they weren’t doing or had no interest in doing. This is a very important parameter for us.
There are members of our community who are extremely skilled at using computers and accessing the Internet. They have invested many hours in honing those skills and they may have little interest in Serotek’s products for personal use. In fact, they may resent it because it seems to give others the same rewards for little effort that they earned with great effort. Yet we are making these people advocates by positioning Serotek’s products as a supplement, not a replacement for their current technology. Serotek’s products let them use powerful Internet-based features and entertainment without forcing them to be tied to a single location. At the same time, those who have an intrinsic fear of computers and technology but are interested in the ability to use computers, connect to family and friends through e-mail and Skype, to shop, or enjoy the many entertainment features available online, can have it now, without undergoing the grueling training necessary to master traditional assistive technology. It is an easy path to major improvements in quality of life.
Meanwhile, the manufacturers of traditional assistive technology are going to face some serious challenges in the future. Where they have always made the user adapt to products and services designed primarily for people who didn’t need assistive technology but for government purchasing agencies, we have turned that strategy on its head. Serotek adapts its products to its users; it doesn’t force its users to adapt to anything but new possibilities. The analogy we use is the “electronic curb cut” which simply removes the barrier for all.
Disruptive? Heck yeah! Serotek’s products absolutely turn the tables. With Serotek’s products, people rule, not technology. And so-called disabilities are simply user characteristics that we accommodate.
We read Professor Christiansen’s analysis and pump our fists and shout “Right on!”. We may not have set out to follow these rules, but these rules describe the way we organize and execute our business strategy, out of necessity and passion for our market, rather than driven by any “formula for success.” And we have an abiding faith that this approach will carry through to success - success for our customers who, for the first time, can enjoy the full benefits of accessibility anywhere; success for our investors whom we firmly believe will be richly rewarded for their faith in us; and ultimately success for ourselves as well. We are convinced that we have just scratched the surface. Our disruptive Serotek has a whole lot more disrupting to do, before it too becomes staid and old hat.
Isn’t this fun?
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