Over the last few days, discussion on 986’s roger group surfaced around talk that Microsoft is going to make a full fledged screen reader and they don’t care what happens to companies like AI Squared and freedom Scientific. One of my good friends, Herbie Allen, indicated to me and others that this type of talk has been going on for years since Windows 7 came about.
I sent a draft of this article to someone who is a tech trainer on apple and android devices who had a training session. Someone had mentioned that Microsoft indicated that they didn’t care, and discussion indicates that they could take out things that the assistive tech companies need to hook in to so that we can have the access. I personally can’t confirm this, but if it has been discussed for years, only time will tell what Microsoft decides to do in the long run.
The Jared Rimer Network has not seen anything in reports from twitter sources indicating anything either way.
With the announcement in August of Microsoft allowing people with assistive technology to continue to have the free offer to upgrade to Windows 10 if they have the technology and this support article entitled: All keyboard commands and touch gestures supported by Narrator in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update you’d think that they are not giving up on the assistive tech players quite yet.
I know there are continuing issues being reported about Windows 10 and its potential privacy issues including Cortana and its sharing data, as well as the inability to turn off settings to limit such data, but an interesting thought was mentioned in the group. The same thing is done with IOS and Siri where it shares and has access to data to carry out tasks like whats up on your calendar, calling people, and other things that siri can do including math and other basic functions.
I don’t want to jump to conclusions to say that Microsoft is or is not going to cut out access to what our screen reader can do, but I will be watching this particular development with interest.
I don’t think the assistive tech companies will go down quietly, not without a fight. The big companies will fight anyway, don’t know about the smaller companies or the startups.
If you would like to be reminded about the Microsoft continuing windows 10 upgrade for assistive tech users after July 2016, please go to this articcle from blind bargains called: After Closing the Free Upgrade to Windows 10 for Mainstream Users, Microsoft Delivers on Promise to AT Users which was posted on August 2, 2016. Also, on the 4th of August, the same source posted You, too can Live on the Edge With the Anniversary Update to Windows 10 where it has a link to a spot where you can learn if things you can do would need work arounds or other information to get tasks done.
I would like to hear from you, if you’ve read things confirming or denying this recent news which has been going around for years. We all need to be informed as to what is up so we can decide at that time whether to jump windows ship, or whether we should give this a try and see what Microsoft has up its sleve.
To contact me, you may roger me at jaredrimer or you may go to my main web site for other contact information. Thanks for reading!
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Enter your comment here…Hello Shaun,
You’ve got some valid points, here. Tech is already getting in the middle of sexual things as we know. and some people are uncomfortable. Even the government wants to get data on all of this. I’m not upgrading to 10, and if the person training the access trainer I speak of is telling the truth, we’re seriously going to lose in the long run. Nobody needs to know our private things such as what you speak. I’m not happy about whats happening, and while I’ve not posted what I’ve read lately, there has gbeen a lot in the security aspect. It can’t last this way forever, or maybe it will, just because it’ll be forced. Only time will tell what is going to happen.
And this is going to help how?
I perfectly understand why ms wants to hide bits of itself.
Thats not the issue, in theory binding all access with one unified library meaning we don’t need to know what is needed is probably the right thing to do.
But does microsoft really think its narator engine will handle fine?
From the latest edge issue etc with other screenreaders I can only sermize that eatch team’s communication is floored.
What is the use of one team knowing how one thing works, etc etc, etc.
With apple removing the headphone jack from its devices we allready see some users saying that apple has gotten stagnent and while that doesn’t mean I won’t buy apple it does mean that it sets a dangerious president.
Fact is android or linux which it effectively is is taking over the market in a big way.
Right now thats not as good as apple but for how long.
If ms goes the same way good luck with customers buying and not pirating windows.
win7 works, win8 x sucks win 10 still sucks as far as the users that use classic shell think.
I don’t use the cloud like ms wants and I am sure as fuck not going to change my reasons.
There are many reasons that I don’t want an online account the most simple of which I really don’t want to be bombarded with messages while I am trying to like work!
on 7 I can start up and if I want something to fuck off I can say fuck off and off it goes thats not possible.
I also don’t agree with the newer style of apps.
What is wrong with desktop apps for the disabled at any rate.
Now, every reader is playing catchup.
Nvda who has always accessed windows libraries is trying to stay up.
Do microsoft want to die.
Because if this is all true I want to say publically that the next version of windows I load if its not on another old computer will be pirated.
And every windows version I install on others who say the same will be pirated!
I stop short of distributing pirated coppies, but does microsoft realise that they will lose a lot of their customer base, apple is going to get that treatment soon enough.
And as I said they were both going so well.
Just stable and now look at them!!
In all seriousness I am actually disgusted in both these companies right now.
Do they realise that they are fucking over their entire customer bases who have spent countless dollars on their software to only have them throw their patronage in their muther fucking faces?
Do they realise that they were loved by their user base?
The problem now is we are now locked in to their software and they can do what they want.
I started with windows, a lot of stuff is now windows, to switch will mean losing a lot of things from games to other programs, thousands of dollars of programs, etc.
For my dad to switch from apple to android will involve a long process to transfer.
Just for my brother to switch from his old to his new android device he had to install several programs some full with trogens and other malware to get his contacts to transfer so everyone seems to be doing it right now.
I usually wouldn’t get angry, but for goodness sake, why are these companies being so greedy.
They have the market, surely they must know that users are approacing the end of what they can actually use on a daily basis.
Perhaps thats it, they realise they have to change and like the old music industry are fighting to stay the big power house they once were.
They are certainly doing a lot of whining than that industry.
I have seen the industry in that reguard, push prices up on print/ cds and have gone lower on digital.
At the same time offering cds, lp records and tapes for those that want it.
Microsoft and others should realise the market is about saturated and listen to users for once.
We as users want the following.
Performance, and a system that works.
A good desktop, and maybe all those apps we enjoy.
The new brouser maybe or maybe not.
We have enough email and web brousers as it is.
We like our clouds, our social media, but not in our faces unless we are on the go.
We don’t need to be spyed on.
Ok, not to be spyed on but to be spyed on for no added extra.
With ms pushing for user feadback and thats good of them, they are still falling short.
Next, yes we are happy you are hiding bits of your os and making everything conform to 1 unified library, but could you please stop fucking breaking it!
What this means in the short term is probably nothing.
In the long, free and opensource readers may survive.
Comercial ones maybe the older ones will die off or become part of microsoft.
Narator will continue to suck.
What I don’t get is why ms just doesn’t put windoweyes in their os and take over ai squared screen reader portion they basically own gw micro so why not use a resource they allready have.
If I owned jaws rights I’d do the same thing.
Then have your screen reader arm focus on making your system work and you focus on whatever you do.
We already know that bluetooth quality can be bad at times, and we also know there are things we don’t nneed.
Bluetooth in devices is fine if we have or need devices in the first place.
All those virtual reality headsets will sell for gamers but are still pricy.
As a standard power user, I need a system simple to run, with the ability to load what I wish and need etc, etc.
I don’t need something to tell my friends when I had sex last or tell them that I havn’t had it yet.
I have my tablet for that if I want.
And thats another thing, I really think if ms wants to retire things they should cap win7 off and release security updates for that and call it windows desktop, and have windows cloud or something and keep that as the latest windows.
I am perfectly happy if all future windows development stops right now if thats what they want.
The shell is stable and fast, ie sucks but I have firefox and thunderbird.
I have skype desktop to.
I do not need ribbons, I don’t need a new start menu, and I need no extras.
I am happy with what I have.
I do know for a fact that my next version of windows will probably be off ebay or on a recycled system or something because I see no advantage to buy win10 at all.
Now if microsoft improves its reader so it rivalls android, apple and linux, I’ll do something cool, I am not sure but I’ll do something cool right here on this site.
But I doubt it.
I also don’t think ms will survive if it continues.
I think it should rethink what its users actually want.
We are almost at an end where the userbase will have everything it wants.
We don’t want much more.
I see no room for new inovation.
Its true that some tech like headphone jacks are old same with desktops.
However why did the music industry bring back vinal and the casette even at higher prices why the tape?
We all know those are gone surely.
Maybe ms needs to take a leaf and look.
I can tell you what users would like back, startup, shutdown and logoff sounds, a normal win7 desktop and shell.
The removal of ie maybe and maybe better tech as part of their experience.
We are sick of having to install third party tools just to keep things that should be active in the first place.
Ok rant over
Hi folks,
Shaun, great comments. To add to this, I heard from someone who said I should change the article with the following.
discussion indicates that they are taking out things that the assistive tech companies need to hook in to so that we can have the access required to properly use various aspects of our screen readers with Windows. Microsoft, Apparently, doesn’t care about this and has not promised they won’t block more parts of Windows from being accessed by screen readers in the future.
So far, we can confirm that this is a problem and it may be a bigger issue according to the assistive trainer I spoke to in regards to this article. This is going to be too bad.
Hi jared and all. sssssscreeeen reader!!! lololololol.
Hmmm thats an interesting thing.
If ms has a reader that is better than the rest then it may.
However we are not talking apple with their extensive reader here.
I know that for one, the readers I use supernova for one does have an advantage over certain apps where you need a virtual curser to navigate them.
Not all apps use standard controls, and play by the rules.
And while most of the web based apps do well I can’t see it.
Even though the guys at coolblind tech say narator is the best its ever been, its never going to be a s
Fact is narator has the reputation of being total crap and I doubt with all its changes it will change much.
For narator to even come close to things it needs to.
1. read all dialogs and controls.
2. work on all web brousers, irc and chat clients, email apps, etc.
Read or beep for progress and other dialogs, have the ability to use non ms voices.
It needs to sit in the system trey.
It needs a vertual cursor like dolphin’s one or jaws.
It needs a graphics intercept for those programs that need it etc.
It has only a few of those.
Its good to navigate ms apps, wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow!
Its absolutely fucking shit at anything else though oh and it can’t do office stuff aparently.
If ms is really serious about its um screen reader, they should take say windoweyes which it basically owns, and or nvda or both and bung them inside the os.
Nvda uses their frameworks fore than other readers ever have and yeah the framework is sound.
I know for a fact that with the multitude of changes ms makes to its new dynamic and totally fucked up os that is 10 that even for the devs at nvaccess its almost impossible to keep up with even with the apps addon essential to use win10 its hard.
They aren’t doing a bad job but still.
Conercial readers lag behind that.
When something breaks, users don’t want to wait a month for a fucking update to fix something but not everything, they want the problem fixed.
Now if uia worked, and if it was all in when windows started we wouldn’t have need of any screenreading software and no discussion.
I do know what will happen though for windows users if ms kills the market.
1. with windows latest having such a bad reader people will crack windows and use old versions.
windows 7 and xp while probably insecure are perfect os choices for the blind.
2. apple and linux will get more of the market.
I know friends that hate windows and have gone the linux rout and several that have gone the apple rout.
3. it is now possible to run your life on an android device, my brother does that now and hardly uses his pc.
I think ms are kidding themselves.
They spent so long letting others try to get windows to work, hmmmm.
I’d like to think that if we heard we were not needed the free previders like nvaccess would continue to run as long as there was demand.
Ai, fs and the like I am not sure.
Most of the big companies are funded by schools, and grants for industry, government and funding organisations rather than users so ms reader would have to be that good for it to continue.
At any rate for those companies that have other products as well as readers, I suspect they would probably shut down those lines and continue without.
I know both fs, and ai both handle a lot more than readers now so do serotech, dolphin etc.
If the reader market dropped, well so be it.
The major issue with narator is it is compatible only with microsoft programs.
And since ms does not release itsself to the public in this reguard in fact it only releases itself rights included when they don’t care or it will do no dammage.
So yeah we can use their apis, heck write programs, get into the shell, etc but no one has kernal access at all.
No one has master access.
I know on android and linux everyone has access to everything.
On apple they have made it so uniform that you do have access, and if you jailbreak which while they don’t encourage it they silently allow you can get kernal access.
Ms flatly refuses even to silently let people hack in and do whatever.
Apple do watch us hack in, heck they may even acknowledge when they take a feature out of that hack pool that hackers previded that feature to them even if it was something they should have done themselves.
Even if ms did this even if they didn’t want to come out publicly like apple is doing that would be an improvement.
But its not happening.
Now you certainly can get kernal access, you certainly can hack in.
But it won’t do you any good.
Ms is unlikely to actually do anything about your usefull hack, they may even sue you for it and put an update to protect their status quoe.
Even with all the reports I doubt ms will succeed.
The industry has grown fat and greedy and they won’t lye down without a fight, becides, who trusts ms screen readers.
Look at uia, it has so much wrong with it.
Look at old but faithfull msaa which I am using on 7, it works floorlessly.
On the up side, as long as all software is based of cloud and web services, its possible that narator won’t have to work so hard to keep things working as they should.
If I was ms, I’d actually scale my desktop shell back to xp, or 7 and just release the os as is, for nothing.
That way we can continue to use 7 for ever more etc, etc.
I do think we will reach the end of tech our consumers can afford.
1, usb, 1 2 3 3.1 maybe c.
2. bluetooth.
Usefull only on tablets, yes laptops can have it but really who has a lot of bt hardware.
3. wireless, yeah we have a lot of that.
4. holograms, who can fucking afford it.
5. vr headsets, see above.
6. any future tech not needed by jo public bar gaming and hard core gamers, same above.
I do think we have reached the end of tech.
Unless you are a gamer you don’t need that 10tb video card, that 500000 tb hdd or ssd drive, an i 9000 cpu 6000000 gb of ram, etc.
We are going to come to a point way before we use all the computing power available to us under the current mores law system and start wandering if we shouldn’t scale down a bit.
Right now I am almost at the end of my power level.
the i5 duel, with 4gb ram and a 1gb radion is just about all I want.
An i7 with 2-3gb radion graphics, 8-16gb ram, an ssd and hdd hybred, a blueray player or writer maybe combo a 1-2tb hdd wireless, duelband support.
usb 2 3 whatever standards, hdmi, earphone jacks, and so on is probably my limit.
After that who knows.
I have often wandered if I could go backwards.
Before the 7 box I had a core 2 duo 2.4 ghz with 2gb ram, a 120gb hdd an internal video card and xp.
I could probably survive with less than I have now.
My uncle got an old 3 year old i7 from ebay, an hp, and put an ssd in it alongside his hdd and it works just fine and only cost him round 900 bucks in total.
It has win10 but had win7 initially.
It runs like the clappers.
Its not even the latest i 7.
Fact is we are kidding ourselves if we think we can get more out of our stuff than we can.
Back to ms, I doubt vary much the way ms is going that narator will ever be a screenreader.
And even if it becomes it will never equal the rest.
Nvda which I am using is opensource along with its apps addon, and has served well through 5 itterations of the os from its early beginnings in windows xp, to its latest on win10.
Through all that, its base install package has remained at the size of just under 20mb.
and its full install round 50-100mb in size with vary few external libraries.
I know for a fact that it still supports xp and single core cpus.
That its synth by default while robotic is cross platform, and that it is supported by ms, adobe, mozilla and several others.
It has a lot more functionality than in some ways jaws etc ever will since itself is a script based on the scripting language python and uses python as its kernal and core with a few extras chucked in.
The program is prity much python code all the way through.
To write a module for it you need to know python and also the right guide to using the engine to write a module for it.
You don’t need to know anything else.
And if your addon is that good it can be put into the core code.
It uses all the basic technologies, rich text, mshtml, msaa, uia, the list goes on and on.
Where other readers have needed an intercept nvda didn’t have one of those or ages and ages.
And even though it now has one, it is only an non invasive hock and not a full load of an extra driver on the systems.
Ms has pushed something where everythin interfaces with its uia library, but whenever they change things things keep breaking.
At any rate, every time they update windows there is always a hyped blurb about their increased accessability in narator.
And it means nothing even though I know they must have bribed some in cbt because they say how good it is when we know its complete fucking shit!
It was fucking shit before, it is now and will always bee we should remember that.
Trust in ms I have not.
The screenreaders will be deleted campaign has been going on for ages and ages.
If it happens and its all good I’ll be happy, but I suspect not.
The big companies will fight.
With ms loosing on its phone market and with all the issues its had so far with the fiascos on vista and 8 and its continuing disaster which is 10, with the intrusive upgrade schemes and other corrupt practices I doubt they could stand that.
There was even a time they could have been split completely.
If they don’t watch what they do they could be isimilated by another colective, or else exterminated or deleted depending on what sifi race you associate with power.
Ms has had it rough, they have also made a lot of users angry!
I personally think they should continue as they are and live in the hole they are now stuck in.
If they try to get out it will only become worse for us users.
Its not really ideal but they made their bed a long time ago if they refuse to sleep in its its not the users fault that they fucked up and keep doing so.
The thing that got me angry about 10 and still has me riled is the fact so much hype was put into the system.
like all others.
vista had a fallback of sorts to classic mode and 7 calmed down.
8 and 8.1 were bad, 10 was supposed to fix everything like a good reformat.
Instead it runs like a virus.
Its always changing and breaking and I for one am happy I have not upgraded yet.
The copy dialog in explorer is messed up now for example, you can’t go edit/select all, file new etc like you could earlier.
Much that the devout users will say you have to upgrade with the times I see I will be using old new explorer, classic shell and other things in my pro 10 to continue to use the os without any problem.
Either that or I will simply buy a win xp or 7 box, and load on security apps like no one’s business, at least I will know I can access my data without being spied on by a company that has no idea where they will go next.
My view is that ms needs to take things to the basics and I mean the basics like win95 basics.
Most users want a desktop, a start menu, a good explorer shell, an office app, etc.
If you have that you can put your cloud services on top of that.
but no edge, no bing, no ms account for everything.
We just want to use our systems peacefully.
I am right now using win7 peacefully.
On my dad’s system he has a local account and is to some extent using win10 peacefully.
I have some people on the go with ms accounts, friends, etc and if they have a power cut, or some data interuption, at the best of times they have to varify their right to use their computer.
At most its another take the system to get reformatted again.
True power cuts can effect a lot of things.
But a laptop with a battery even if the internet is cut and time is totalled like it happened to me once shouldn’t have to reactivate windows, reset their ms account password, revarify their account, and get a background check from the fbi to continue with their lives.
Or simply have to reformat so it works.
I think ms are kidding themselves at this point.
Their oses are not simple and when they break you don’t know what is broken.
A good reformat will get things working but you can’t fix what you don’t know.
On the other side it doesn’t break to badly if you leave it alone or run standard microsoft software.