QuinIf my home timeline is any indication, the number of Move orders Ableton has gotten from blind people across the world in the past 24 hours has gone up by like 300%. Mostly thanks to some random dude making an open source project.
Toni Barth@TheQuinbox Sad thing is, as far as I know, people have asked Ableton to just provide us with an on-board screen reader from when the first video on it came out back in the day. They always avoided it with various excuses. Man, the moment we got the first device into our hands and noticed its basically just a Raspi we all knew it was possible, and not even hard to do at all. Talking about a company just doing as much as they need to generate income.
Matt Campbell@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Has anyone figured out how to hack the device to do TTS output on-device alongside other audio yet? I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on the reasons they gave.
@matt @ToniBarth That's what Move Everything does. It uses espeak or flight.
@TheQuinbox @ToniBarth Oh shit, I might have to buy one of these too. Don't know if the actual music application will be my thing, but I'm perpetually curious about how companies do Linux-based devices.
@matt @TheQuinbox I'd like to have one too, but I am kinda stuck in a moral loop hole. I find it unfair that a dev not related with Ableton fixed their accessibility issues, for free, and now Ableton is making thousands of dollars of someone's free labour.
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Work on products or product features is always speculative. You look at possibilities, guess about what you think will be profitable to work on, and hope you're right. Given that, if I'm not mistaken, Ableton had already implemented a roundabout way for blind people to use the device, they arguably did the minimum that was legally required. I don't think I can fault them for not going ahead and implementing something equivalent to Move Everything. (continued)
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Do we know how many thousands Ableton actually made because of Move Everything? Or how much it would have cost them to have their engineering team do it?
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Even outside of a framework of sociopathic profit maximization, there are always competing priorities and limited resources. I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft. At the team's peak, we had more than 20 developers working on Windows accessibility. We still had competing priorities and limited resources.
James Scholes@matt @ToniBarth There is the business/legal case (although I'm not clear about which legal requirements you're asserting would apply to this product), and there is the idea that accessibility must be continually pushed forward to avoid a state of subsistence for people who need it.
These positions need to be reconciled for progress to be made, not treated as incompatible opposites. Acceptance of everybody doing the bare minimum isn't helpful, nor is dismissal of every bit of legitimate effort because it could've been better.
CC @TheQuinbox