The Cost of Accessibility

Austin Seraphin’s posts on his experiences using the Voice Over technology in iPhone and Mac OS has been mentioned fairly widely and they are definitely worth reading. Many people understand that blind users, and people with other forms of disabilities, are dependent on screen readers to interact with computers, but what is likely to come as a shock is just how expensive high quality screen readers can be:

I joyfully look forward to the day when blind people finally catch on and realize that for $700, HALF the cost of JAWS for Windows, the most popular software used or rather pushed on the blind, they can get a fully functional computer that delivers a superior experience and comes with a superior screen reader with superior speech. JAWS standard edition turns out to be $895 on the online store, professional $1095 but that still doubles the cost of a computer for users who need a screen reader. There are open source screen readers and my understanding is that some of them are quite good, but the defacto-standard is very much JAWS. Most accessibility testing that is done is with JAWS and so it’s an up-hill battle to use anything else.

If you keep that cost in mind, you can understand why old versions of screen reader software are so common. It also brings a new understanding to the blog post from the IE9 team indicating that screen readers would need to be updated to work with it:

IE9 fundamentally changes how users interact with the browser and how the browser takes advantage of the entire PC. Those changes also impact how assistive technology interacts with IE, which necessitates updates from some assistive technology. For example, the new notification model is not read by many screen readers, and screen readers can no longer depend on the GDI display subsystem since IE9 uses Windows Direct2D and DirectWrite as part of enabling hardware-accelerated HTML5. The move to Direct2D and DirectWrite may well make sense, though it’s disappointing that screen readers felt the need to depend on a display sub-system instead of proper accessibility APIs for some reason. However, I find it quite appalling that the new notification model is inaccessible. Surely there is, or should be, a standard set of Windows APIs that can provide this kind of notification in a way that is also accessible to screen readers.

It seems to me that having the full screen reader API built in to the OS and maintained, as a priority, by the OS team is a pretty revolutionary step forward in terms of both reducing the cost of accessibility and improving it’s quality. It sounds like we still have an awfully long way to go though.