On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Doug Sutherland wrote: > I am very displeased with the cost of systems for blind people and > people with poor motor skills. I bought a keyboard for $450 that > is for people who can't type on normal keyboards, it's probably > worth $70. The cost of speech synthesizers, braille keyboards, and > all kinds of alternative devices are sickeningly expensive. In my > opinion people are taking advantage of this market, and I think > it's flat out wrong to do that. I thought that when I first saw lots of the AAC devices that my then housemate showed me (he was doing a Design Technology PhD and had started to work on what was effectively a wearable computer that ended up being disguised as a bumbag and leather bound book). He pointed out that one possible reason for the high cost was that market the companies were aiming for was relatively small. Therefore they needed to make a high percentage markup on each item to cover their costs and still make a profit. If they could produce 100 million instead of 100, the fixed costs would be a smaller percentage of the total cost of the product and so the price could be reduced. Its the same argument that HMD vendors have put forward. He was very keen on producing an AAC device that would be useful for the target audience but would also (possibly with a small change in hardware software) be attractive to the wider market. Partly so that the production runs could be bigger and partly so that non-AAC users with lots of cash (business, etc) could effectively be subsidising poor AAC users (no/low paid jobs, etc). Its a tricky path to walk because (for example) the keyboard for his target users would have been useless for a person like me who didn't have a speech impediment/poor motor skills; it was way too big for me. Likewise the small QWERTY keyboard I'm typing this on would be useless to them (they can't read or write for one thing, plus many had poor motor control). You need to work out how powerful to make the "core" part of the systems (CPU, batteries, etc) and make the I/O modular. If you're going to empower users you've also got the headache of finding connectors that they can deal with but that won't just pop undone at the first snag. Not easy from what I saw of his work. Good luck with it though Doug - if you crack it you'll improve a lot of people's lives (and who knows, maybe make the odd penny or two yourself along the way? :-) ). Oh, and its good to have you back posting to the wearhard mailing list again - you're an ideas factory! Tatty bye, Jim'll -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail