SANCB Request (fwd)

[Lee Maschmeyer]

Hi Anina and all,

Everybody's going to jump on me, but anyway...

It's true that Jaws is expensive; so is Window-Eyes. On the other hand, the 
reality of life is that open source just isn't very popular as far as the 
desktop is concerned. So you can get lots of free software, but the 
employers are likely to be as resistant to embracing a whole new operating 
platform as they are to spending relatively large amounts of money.

The server is one area where open source (which for practical purposes means 
Unix and variants) is widely used, so the combination of brltty for braille 
and any of the speech packages (Speakup, emacspeak by whatever 
capitalization, YASR) should give much more stable performance. I've used 
Jaws for more than 8 years and, especially in braille, find it a struggle 
compared to Linux. So if you find an employer who's already into Unix, 
you've got it made (relatively speaking at least). But in terms of general 
office work etc. you might find it harder to find employers you can mesh 
with. Never can tell, though; if you meet an employer right when they're 
thinking of switching away from Windows, you might luck out.

Now watch the fur fly...

--
Lee Maschmeyer
<lee_maschmeyer at wayne.edu>

"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear
to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than
what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
     --Lewis Carroll