Mastodawn

I'm yet again reminded that accessibility technologies are priced unfairly. Did you know that a pair of hearing aids starts at roughly £500 but an average model can easily cost over £1500? And it's not like it's rocket science.
Similarly, Braille displays start at £1500, but can easily cost over £5000.
Similarly, the most popular and one of the most affordable Braille printers costs almost £3000.

Something can be said about special design requirements for such devices, or about the fact that there is no demand to make them at the scale that would allow to cut the costs ten times. And I can't even say that a high price is an excuse; if you'd try to build a Braille embosser that can operate at practical speeds with decent reliability using off the shelf components, you are likely to spend more money on it than you'd spend getting a commercial solution, even without R&D costs.

So, uh, folks, we can do better. I can't be the only one who keeps thinking about making such technologies cheaper, right?

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Rudi (ryjelsum)Feb 2

@nina_kali_nina i've had a lot of issues with this in an academic context especially lol. like, i can figure out how to use consumer technology to navigate my disability (for this purpose: i cannot handwrite very much at all without the handwriting becoming laborious and illegible) but it doesn't help me very much when i cannot take those consumer technologies into assessment type situations typically due to all computers having wi-fi nowadays as a general rule, and there's really no guarantee that the college will have anything similar available

edit: the most direct example i think is actually how difficult it is to get just a word processor nowadays for cheaper than a laptop. the laptop is just simply the more practical option, but it doesn't meet the requirements of a typical assessment situation, and my situation does not seem to be very 'standard' from the conversation's i've had with my accessibility center over the years of having them sternly tell teachers to let me type things

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lilo

@rudi @nina_kali_nina there is another problem with consumer technology as accessibility aids: health insurance pays for my hearing aids (at least partially) – but not for new smartphones when my neighbours with diabetic kids have to replace all their devices because the monitoring app for the insulin pump stops supporting older devices (old: everything below iPhone 13).