The exploitation of the blind
If you have questions or comments, email the author at averlicetech@proton.me
The blindness industry is filled with holes that exploit the blind, not help them. In this post, we will explore just one of these holes,and how this relates to the blindness industry.
Let’s take jaws as an example.
“JAWS, Job Access With Speech, is the world’s most popular screen reader, developed for computer users whose vision loss prevents them from seeing screen content or navigating with a mouse. JAWS provides speech and Braille output for the most popular computer applications on your PC. You will be able to navigate the Internet, write a document, read an email and create presentations from your office, remote desktop, or from home.”
This all sounds good, but let’s look at the price
Let’s take a look at their pricing options
It’s important to remember that jaws aren't anything special. It’s a screen reader.
If we take a look at their home yearly price, yearly alone, it’s $623.00 a year.
If you’re on a device that isn’t reading numbers and needs numbers: that would be six hundred twenty three dollars a year
That’s around $51.92 per month.
Now I'll get to my opinions later, right now I just wanna go with the facts.
So let’s compare that to windows narrator and NVDA
What’s the price for those? O wait, there isn’t. They’re both free. NVDA is even open source, if you want an open source option/alternative to narrator, but let’s press on.
Additionally, there is a perpetual license. This would be the preference, but there is a problem we must discuss.
In the perpetual licensing, it mentions something known as a software maintenance agreement (SMA)
Quoting from the horses mouth:
“To ensure the ability to use your computer with the continuous updates of Windows, Office®, your browser, and other applications, your purchase includes a Software Maintenance Agreement (SMA). An SMA ensures you are protected now and in the future, as it includes the next two years of JAWS.
SMAs are activated on the date of purchase.
SMAs are tracked by term (e.g., 24 months) from activation, no longer tied to a product version.“
A SMA basically forces you to pay more than you already paid for software you already licensed, ahem, sorry, I mean,bought, ahem, sorry.
Something in my throat…
The problem is you already have the software. You paid the onetime fee. And yet they’re making it more expensive on you, the user.
If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking long term.
If you are, you might wanna get a perpetual license. But what good is it when you are literally paying for a, let’s call it what it is, subscription, that you didn’t wanna pay for in the first place?
One of the people I've noticed people trying to make is that they have features. They need to sustain themselves. They have scripts.
Sustaining yourself?
First off, I've seen businesses sustain themselves, while charging far less money.
In fact, I worked in one before. It didn’t have much money but maybe a few thousand, and it was still able to sustain itself.
In fact, it did very well, and earned more money each day.
As for NVDA, NVDA literally delivers it free of charge. They primarily go from donations, and corporate IT help and support.
In fact, on the page linked above for nvda, you can literally go to it, and you can donate some of your money to them if you would like to support the cause.
Though, here is the donation link. And while I don't have the money to donate, I encourage the people reading or listening to this document to donate to the cause, because it is what a screen reader is supposed to be.
On the point of jaws scripts, yes, to be fair, they have their uses. In fact, brian hartgen, who owns hartgen consultancy, makes a profit off of selling jaws scripts.
Here is the website of hartgen consultancy if you would like to check them out. I would recommend them if you are still using jaws.
But either way.
Jaws scripts, even, cost.
If i was to be paying for a screen reader which is over $600, i would expect any script to be free. The reason for this is you already paid for the software.
Jaws could embed what these scripts have to.
NVDA has a similar feature called addons, which is also free. Certain addons are paid, but downloading them is usually free.
First off, the price is outrageously high. This is downright exploitative, and there is no reason for prices to be this high.
I don’t care what justifications you give me, none of them are going to work. They’re all bologna.
There are a lot of blind people who don’t even have a hundred dollars, and you expect them to pay $600 for a screen reader?
Absolutely not!
This is a never event. The only exception is if a screen reader is so good that it can read every single image, with absolutely 0 tolerance for failure which I know from experience it cannot do.
Scripts alone can also be expensive, and I know for a fact FS does not pay people to do scripting. It’s like NVDA addons, just smaller and less tolerable.
There is absolutely no reason for a screen reader to cost almost a thousand dollars a year, point, blank, period!
I don’t care about your justifications, they’re all bologna.
In addition to this, it also can’t read every single web page, it can’t read every single application that doesn’t have proper screen reader adjustments.
This makes it even more not worth $600.00, not even worth a hundred dollars.
Again, NVDA is free, and open source. Even they don’t charge abnormal amounts for screen reader usage.
Also, it’s worth noting, at least not that i could find, jaws *doesn’t* have a portable copy. That means you can’t just put it on a flash drive and take it with you. At least on NVDA you can create a portable copy.
This, once again, is not worth my money.
The things jaws does, most of them you can do with either NVDA or narrator.
No account required to use any such program. Even the narrator will work without a microsoft account.
This is to sustain a billion lives, not to sustain some employees and the owner. This is for elites and organizations who can avoid it, such as rehab organizations, not people like you and me.
They don’t have us at heart, they have their bank accounts and maybe even, who knows, billionaire elites at heart.
This is something i didn’t see before.
There is, emphatically, a jaws annual license home that can be purchased for $104
Review that page here
Thanks to david goldfield for letting me know of this.
Even then, it still feels exploitative to an extent. Even if jaws annual is under $100 they should clearly outline this within the jaws page linked to at the beginning of the page, for US customers. I am in the US myself and am rather disappointed they didn’t either redirect me to this page, or just show a heading that says so.
It sounds like they are trying to hide this discount intensionally, as i could not find it in the first page i checked. Of course, do let me know if i went wrong on this, or if there’s something i’ll missing, and as i did just now, i will correct my mistake.
I do not recommend getting jaws, or any software like this, because it is very exploitative, and most features can be done using NVDA.