Peter Korn's Weblog

Last month I posted in response to Chris Hofstadter's interview in AFB AccessWorld about the high price of AT products for the blind. As promised, I'm going to continue a thread I started at the end of my posting - a different approach to developing AT that is lower cost and more stable. But first, a digression...

In the AccessWorld article, Chris Hofstadter stated that sales of all screen readers from all companies is 2,000 month. That works out to 24,000 a year. Since the first Windows screen readers came out in 1993 (14 years ago), if we (somewhat generously) assume that sales have increased at a steady rate from 0, that is a total sales of 168,000 Windows screen readers. Make the further simplifying assumption that these sales serve 2/3rds of the users (half of the users only ever had one screen reader their entire life, the other half tried more than one over the 14 year period), and we have 112,000 blind people served by screen readers, having access to a computer and the Internet.

112,000 seems like a lot of people, and it is. But it is only a small fraction of the number of blind people who could benefit from this critical technology. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but roughly speaking in the Western World, roughly 1 person in 1,000 is blind and could benefit from a screen reader. If we assume that these 2,000/month screen reader sales are only in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe (the places where JAWS and WindowEyes and Supernova and ZoomText have been localized and run in the native languages), we are looking at a total blind population of roughly 7.2 million people. In other words, the commercial screen reader world is managing to serve at best only 15% of the potential market (again, making lots of assumptions in their favor). Now, there are some blind users running on Macintosh, and even some on UNIX (a certain Orca screen reader comes to mind, along with BRLTTY and other Linux console screen reader options). But those represent only a tiny fraction of Windows sales. So let's make a further, generous assumption that the commercial Windows space represents three quarters of the total number of screen reader users. That means we are at best serving only 20% of the potential blind users in the Western World. Remove babies and folks who are of an age that they aren't comfortable with learning this newfangled computer thing, and we will again, generously increase the figure to 30%. And this is in the wealthy West - in places like the U.S. where we have a fair amount of social services, and in Germany and The Netherlands where AT is often purchased for citizens who can demonstrate a need for it.

With all of these generous assumptions, that still means that at least 7 people out of 10 blind folks in the West who could be benefiting from access to technology aren't able to do so. It should be no surprise that the unemployment rate among the blind in the U.S. is 70% - so few blind folks have the opportunity to get the skills to learn how to use a computer. And jobs that involve computer use are some of the most attractive options for the blind (things like professional race car driving haven't panned out I guess...). This also explains why in places like China, the typical job prospect for the blind is massage therapist...

As was noted in the AccessWorld interview with Chris Hofstadter, screen readers cost a lot of money. And as I noted from my recent trip to Brussels, when you get to Europe that may get multiplied considerably. When you are unemployed, $300 for a computer can be an issue; spending 3-10 times more than that for software that lets you use the computer may be nearly impossible.

To finish this digression and get back to fulfilling my promise of sharing thoughts on changing this, I will observe that the approach to getting access solutions to all who need them is perhaps the same approach to making the One Laptop Per Child program accessible. (sorry, another brief digression...)

For folks who haven't met this yet, the One Laptop Per Child initiative is an attempt to provide an inexpensive laptop to enable the nearly 2 billion children in the developing world to "learn learning", with a dramatically smaller investment per pupil than in the West. If we assume the same ratio of 1 blind person per thousand of the West holds in the developing world's children, we are talking about 2 million blind children who need a screen reader if they are to benefit from the OLPC project. 2 million dwarfs by more than an order of magnitude the 112,000 blind folks we've managed to serve in Windows after nearly a decade and a half of working on it.

Getting back to Chris Hofstadter's interview, the key thing I think he was trying to say is that the money spent on screen readers at the retail level is ten times the actual engineering development cost for them. As I noted, such a 10x cost multiplier is totally logical. But software isn't like hardware. It doesn't cost significantly more to make one more CD the way it costs to make one more whole computer. And if the software is something that resides on the hardware of the computer you are shipping, it costs essentially nothing to ship one more - incremental cost is free for the bits that are pre-installed on the computer. [this, by the way, is why Microsoft enjoys such huge profit margins; they provide very little tech support for Windows when bundled with a PC, but they get $50 to $100 or more for every copy of Windows that ships with a PC]

Returning to our calculator, assuming 224,000 total sales of Windows screen readers, $800 retail price per screen reader and $80 of that retail price going to development costs. That's a total engineering investment in Windows screen reader development over the last 14 years of just under $18 million. Divide that by 4 (4 main screen readers: JAWS, WindowEyes, Supernova, ZoomText [which technically speaking is really a screen magnifier]) and you get roughly $4.5 million to develop a screen reader, on average. This is of course a rough number; some screen reader vendors are returning a profit, others a loss. But as a very rough figure, this seems pretty reasonable. Another way to estimate this is to assume an average of 4 folks on the development staff, costing my low estimate from an earlier post of $75,000 year in salary & benefits & such, working for 14 years. These assumptions yield a cost of $4.2 million. Now, most screen reader staffs have grown over time (they don't all start out with 4 folks), and salaries grow over time, but these figures aren't taking into account costs of equipment and facilities. So, overall, $4.5 million continues to seem like a fairly reasonable number.

But if we are bundling a screen reader with every computer (of "average Windows screen reader quality, as developed over the last 14 years"), then it doesn't matter whether we provide this to one blind child or 2 million blind children. The cost to develop it is essentially the same (with some additional costs per language to develop text-to-speech and translate the documentation). Of course, $4.5 million divided by 2 million children works out to $2.25 per blind child served (if we manage to reach all of those children with OLPC; a rather large assumption!).

Nonetheless, the point holds: with relatively fixed development costs and a model that doesn't charge incrementally for software but instead bundles it with the computer (and so eliminates costs of sales and marketing and accounts payable/receivable and shipping and all the rest), we can reach a lot more people at a dramatically lower cost.

And now we need to examine that $4.5 million development figure. We've learned a lot over the last 14 years of Windows screen readers - about what is important in a blind user interface, and what is a good (and not so good) technique for interacting with the web and with a spreadsheet. We have more powerful programming languages like Java and Python, that run in virtual machines with exception handling and garbage collection - features that eliminate whole classes of programming bugs (and the resultant programmer time devoted to tracking down those bugs and fixing them). And if we are prepared to move to environments like UNIX with the UNIX/GNOME accessibility framework (or Macintosh with its accessibility framework) which remove the need to devote huge amounts of programmer time to reverse engineering the operating system and applications, we again save a ton of programmer time and development expense.

So let us now assume that a more powerful development environment saves us 30% of our development time; and the need to reverse engineer saves us another 30%; and because we already know what works and what doesn't, we can get to the same, "average Windows screen reader" level of quality in half the time. 70% of 70% of 50% of $4.5 million gives us a new development cost of about $1.1 million. Let's be generous and round it up to $1.5 million. And now, let's look at Orca -> less than 3 years with an average of around 2.5 people working on it over its lifetime. Given its rapid progress and its increasing closeness in functionality to the "average Windows screen reader", it seems well on track to deliver within that envelope. Back to our rough calculation: $1.5 million for nearly 2 million blind children gets us down to around 75 cents/child.

And this now leads us, finally (and exhaustively) to what I believe is the answer to the "different approach" I hinted at last month:

Long-time readers of this blog will notice that this is exactly what we are doing in UNIX. Sun led the development (and did the overwhelming majority of the code-writing) of an open source accessibility framework for the graphical GNOME environment for UNIX. We further led the development (and again did the overwhelming majority of the code-writing) of support for that framework in the GTK+ and related GNOME UI toolkits, and in the Java Swing toolkit, and in the UNO toolkit (used by StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, and IBM's Lotus Notes 8), and the XUL toolkit (used by Mozilla and Firefox and Thunderbird). Together these graphical toolkits are used by thousands of open source and commercial software products, including major applications from Sun and IBM and Oracle and SAP and Adobe (among many others).

Moving to the AT space, Sun helped fund the development of the first graphical screen reader Gnopernicus. We funded most of the development of the GNOME On-screen Keyboard. We paid our own engineering staff to write Orca. Dasher is funded largely by the Gatsby Foundation. At the same time, improvements to Orca have come from ONCE (the Spanish National Organization for the Blind). And BAUM has funded Gnopernicus development, and funded improvements in Orca (helps sell Braille displays, and can be bundled with Linux underneath a reading machine). And individual blind users and trainers for the blind have contributed to Orca. Meanwhile others in the community developed BRLTTY, which is not only its own console-based screen reader for UNIX, but also the path by which Orca supports over 50 Braille displays. Still others in the community have developed open source text-to-speech engines for a variety of languages. And further, the open source community has translated and localized these AT products to a large set of languages - including many languages not supported by the main commercial Windows AT vendors.

And as a result, we are building a real accessibility ecosystem in open source UNIX. One where accessibility is developed by a community of folks who care about it. One where the software for accessibility is built into the platform, at zero additional per-unit cost. And one where accessibility is improving at a faster pace than in the commercial world (which is still busy maintaining old code in C/C++ with all of its memory management headaches, and still spends a huge portion of its development time reverse engineering every new release of Windows and MS-Office).

Astute readers will note that there is one thing I blithely glossed over - technical support. Just because the screen reader or other AT is built in doesn't mean that its operation is intuitively obvious, that it has been thoroughly tested with all possible software, that it is bug-free. If folks need support, whoever provides it for them should have their time compensated. But when you look at the support agreements for Windows AT today (and in fact, for most software), only a small amount of support is covered in the purchase price anymore. Anything beyond initial support must be paid for separately. So we are still pretty much "comparing apples to apples" here; we just need to make sure that as more people with disabilities use computers - as we grow the blind screen reading population from 110,000 to 2,000,000 - we also provide a support infrastructure for them. In some cases that support will come from whomever provides the platform (Apple for VoiceOver, Sun and Ubuntu for Orca and Dasher and GOK), with whatever support pricing options they provide. In other cases support will come disability organizations (ONCE supporting blind Orca users in Extremadura and Andalusia in Spain). In still others it will be purchased from specialized AT support organizations (as the Social Security Agency does right now for JAWS support). In yet still others, it will come "from the community" (Joanie Diggs and other community members providing e-mail support for Orca to eachother on the Orca users mailing list). For something like the OLPC, the support infrastructures being developed in the countries adopting OLPC will need to also support accessibility.

And in this fashion - and I truly believe in only this fashion - we will be able to provide an accessible system to at least everyone with a disability who can be served via software accessibility solutions.

GNOME 2.18, hot off the presses!

See Sun at CSUN

This year a lot is going on at CSUN. In addition to our usual booth in the Houston room of the Marriott hotel (booth spaces #419 & #420), we are giving the following presentations:

In addition to the Sun-hosted sessions, there are number of other sessions on topics apropos of Orca, OpenDocument format, and UNIX accessibility. Sun is even making a guest appearance in a few of them. They are:

Life imitates art

In a case of life imitating art, I was recently watching a demo of the JAWS screen reader on Vista. When Eric Damery gave the demo, he used a new projector (new to that Vista installation - the laptop and projector had never met electrically prior to the demo), and so Vista promptly started to auto-install the necessary drivers to support the projector. And being that software installation is a potentially risky endeavor, Vista promptly put up a whole series of dialog boxes, warning the user of the security risk involved and asking the user's permission.

Since JAWS was already running, all of this was spoken aloud in the nifty new (and very human-like) voice of JAWS. To the entire room of around 100 people. In dialog box after dialog box. And while Eric Damery doesn't usually resemble John Hodgman (the "I'm a PC" actor), at various moments working through the technical glitches to get the projector working, the resemblance was rather striking. (2007-03-12 12:58:57.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Thoughts on an interesting interview with Chris Hofstader, formerly of Freedom Scientific

One of the 'myths' Hofstader cited (or more accurately stated, "the most outrageous lie in the assistive technology industry") is that the AT industry "is too poor to fix problems and make better products and that there simply is not enough profit in this small market to do as much as talent may allow." Chris is in a excellent position to comment on these things, as for many years he was a senior member of perhaps the largest AT company in the industry. And while I completely agree with him that this and other things he cites are myths, I don't completely agree with him as to the 'real reasons' for the quality and stability of AT products (especially screen readers), and the price of products.

To be clear - the price of AT is a real problem and burden. I was in Brussels last Friday (among other reasons, I needed to get a chocolate fix from Mary Chocolatier - specifically their dark chocolate mouse offerings), and during conversations at the Belgian Confederation for the Blind and Low Vision, I discovered that it costs €3,000 to get a copy of JAWS professional in that country. The blind computer science student I met who would like to use JAWS professional can't get it from his school (they only provide a less expensive and less feature-full version). His parents aren't in a position to buy it for him, even as his mom (also blind) would like to use it for herself as well. And that is in a wealthy socialist democracy. It is far worse for blind folks in places like the Czech Republic!

Likewise the quality and stability of some AT offerings are also a real problem and burden. The stability issues are most significantly present in the most complex AT - screen readers. But where I disagree with Chris - at least as is attributed to him in the AFB AccessWorld article - is with his reasons for why this is the case.

In the article, Chris claims that annual revenues from all screen readers sold worldwide - a stated 2,000 copies/month - is between $18 million and $20 million. He then claims that this revenue is 10 times that of "all the software development people at all the leading screen-reading software companies." In the following paragraph, this is compared to ExxonMobile charging $75/barrel of oil that costs the company $25, and public outrage at that 3x margin (compared to his stated 10x margin for screen readers).

But I really must question these numbers. Chris claims the average selling price of screen readers is $800-$900 (so we will presume that most sales aren't the Belgian edition of JAWS professional). Chris might know the dealer markup, and percentage of sales that go through dealers, but I will just make a simplifying guess that actual revenue back to the screen reader developers is 65% of retail sales (a generous amount). Applied to the higher of Chris' estimates, we now have $13 million/year in revenue to the screen reader company from screen reader sales.

Next, we need to examine the assumption that the only employees important to getting a screen reader into the hands of a satisfied customer are those in software development. Even counting testing and documentation as part of the "software development" organization - they aren't in all companies - you still need some manufacturing, shipping, accounts payable & receivable, technical support, marketing (all those accessibility conferences), sales, and management. Furthermore, with something as technical and complex as a screen reader, training staff is important. And you also need to factor in things like rent on office space, buying computers and other equipment, and travel costs for that sales and marketing work.

Typically in a pure software development company you will have around 25% of the budget actually devoted to software development - 33% if you are very lucky. So that $13 million becomes $4.3 million (assuming the lucky 33% figure). After you factor in facilities and other equipment costs (again lets be nice here in our assumptions), let us presume we have $3.5 million for software developer salaries.

Next assumption: the average software developer salary is $50,000/year, and the "full loaded" cost is $75,000/year (including employer-paid taxes, health insurance premiums, disability insurance, etc.). That results in less than 50 folks in development, across all screen reader vendors. Seems like a lot, right? But that of course includes folks doing testing and documentation (and engineering management). And that is across all screen reader vendors: Freedom, GW Micro, Ai Squared, Dolphin, and others. If we have half of the software development staff actually writing code, divided by (let's say) 5 screen reader companies, we get a bit less than 5 coders on average for each company. And from what I know of these companies, that number isn't too far off the mark.

So if the reason these products are so expensive isn't because of outsize profits, why do they cost so much? And why are at least some of them of poor quality and stability?

I believe a key reason for both of these issues is the lack of good support for accessibility in the Windows operating system, and from the key Windows applications. 4-5 software engineers can get a awful lot done if they aren't spending the bulk of their time reverse engineering the operating system and software applications - and re-implementing that reverse engineering every new release of the OS or key application suite. For proof of this, I need only point to the small Orca screen reader team. 4 core people in less than 3 years have built a very powerful screen reader - something that is far more capable than any Windows screen reader was after 3 or 6 or even 9 years of development. It runs on Solaris and GNU/Linux; and it runs on the SPARC and x86 and PPC microprocessors - that's two different operating systems and three totally different microprocessors - all from the same code.

And it is precisely that need to reverse engineer everything that causes a lot of the issues with product quality & stability. I particularly like the "Telling Press Release" from two screen reader/magnifier vendors who noted with fanfare earlier this year that both of their products could be installed on the same machine at the same time, and both actually continue to function while doing so!

Of course, another reason for the high price comes from the quantity of sales. Worldwide software sales of 24,000 copies/year is minuscule compared to many other software products (cf. the many millions of copies of StarOffice that Sun sells each year - at a much lower price, and with a much larger development staff). Another comparison that I know very well comes from my former employer - Berkeley Systems. We had a team of 5 people making access products (1.5 developers, 1.5 folks doing testing & documentation & tech support all at the same time, and 2 others sharing all the other tasks), and we were struggling to be profitable with a $500 screen reader. Yet the rest of the company (nearly 100 of them) was doing very well selling $20-$50 products - in the millions of copies!

Which rather suggests that a different approach might yield us better quality and stability and lower cost. But this entry is long enough already; so that'll have to wait for another time... (2007-03-09 18:21:21.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Accessible Open Document Exchange Formats - workshop, conference, and presentation in Berlin

The desires that led to the development of the OpenDocument format - guaranteeing long term access to documents because they aren't encoded in a proprietary format that, like Word*Star of old, may not be supported in the future or only at great expense - are shared by many European Governments. Perhaps in part because of Microsoft's recent entry with their Open XML format and their attempt to also make it an ISO standard (as OpenDocument format is already an ISO standard), this workshop generalized the issues under the umbrella of "Open Document Exchange Formats". And just as the more general issues of long term access apply to the general case (and not just ODF), likewise the accessibility issues apply to the general case as well.

I want to share with you a few of the key points I made in my presentation to the ~100 invited guests from 21 member states that were in the audience. After briefly introducing the topic of accessibility, I quoted two directives from the European Council eAccessibility Resolution of February 2003 on improving the access of people with disabilities to the knowledge based society:

ensure that the multimedia materials ... do not create new barriers for the integration of students with disabilities into schools and other places of learning
encourage and empower people with disabilities to take more control over the development of the mechanisms for delivering eAccessibility by support for their increased participation in standardisation bodies and technical committees

Promote cultural diversity in relation to inclusion by fostering pluralism, cultural identity and linguistic diversity in the digital space. Promote... the creation of accessible digital content, and wide and crossnational access to digital information
Promote inclusive eGovernment by ensuring that electronic documents are available in such a way that they can be used by people with disabilities in appropriate and, where possible, EU-wide recognised formats

To me these quotes speak clearly and unequivocally to two key aspects of any adopted open document exchange format: the needs of people with disabilities must be addressed, and people with disabilities must participate in the process of addressing those needs. As I was raised in Berkeley - the birthplace of the Center for Independent Living - this latter directive is familiar to me as the Independent Living movement slogan "nothing about us, without us."

Out of these directives in 2003 and 2006, and from my own experience both in the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility subcommittee, working with folks on accessibility in the State of Massachusetts' adoption of OpenDocument format, and working on accessibility in multiple platforms, I proposed the adoption of the following four Open Document Exchange Format accessibility principles:

It must be easy to convert the open document exchange format file into formats used by people with disabilities (things like the DAISY talking book format, and Braille books)
The standards process must include a peer-review body of disability experts and people with disabilities
ODEF files must be accessible on affordable systems, with affordable assistive technology
Adoption of an open document exchange format shall not require new assistive technology, or a new platform, in order for existing users to adopt it

The third point was particularly well received, especially by the delegates from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, both of whom I chatted with afterward. The European Union is a diverse group of (currently) 27 member states and nearly half a billion people. In some member states like Germany and The Netherlands, people with disabilities have a relatively rich support network with expensive assistive technologies provided to many citizens and employees. Other member states like the Czech Republic are not in a position to provide their citizens with the expensive assistive technologies that enable access to the Information Society. In fact, it is for these cost reasons that the two regions Extremadura and Andalusia in Spain use open source GNU/Linux in all public schools - with the accessible GNOME desktop and assistive technologies like Orca and GOK providing the much needed technology access solutions.

I ended my presentation with a series of demos. I showed the Orca screen reader, the GNOME On-screen keyboard, and the Dasher alternate text entry system on Solaris Express Developer Edition, all working well with OpenOffice.org. Then I rebooted to Windows, and showed the JAWS screen reader working with Microsoft Office opening, reading, and saving an OpenDocument text file - all thanks to the now available for download StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows users read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format. I finished my demo and presentation with a demonstration of a pre-release version of the Duxbury Braille Translator, translating the text of the OpenDocument format slides I'd just presented into Braille.

The presentation was well received. I think this was the first time many of the attendees had seen (and heard) a screen reader. Quite a few came up to me afterward, and affirmed the importance of addressing accessibility requirements in any adopted open document exchange format.

For all parties involved, the exchange of documents and data between authorities, businesses and citizens must be possible without technical barriers. The public administration must not exclude anyone from participating in an electronic procedure owing to the use of a specific product. The Member States are agreed that in the future electronic documents should be exchanged fully on the basis of open document exchange formats.
delivering inclusive eGovernment for the benefit of all Europeans and thereby make services easier to access and use. Member States are encourage to enhance efforts to achieve the 2010 target of 100% accessibility of electronic services as agreed by Ministers in the June 2005 [sic] Riga declaration.

P.S. It turns out I was not the only person talking about accessibility at the ODEF workshop. I was pleased that Jean Paoli of Microsoft also made (a very brief) mention of supporting people with disabilities in his presentation. However, when I asked him if he could name any of the accessibility experts, or people with disabilities (even Microsoft employees!) who had reviewed their Open XML file format for accessibility, he couldn't give me even one name. (2007-03-08 18:15:01.0) Permalink


	Peter Korn's Weblog The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

One (Accessible) Laptop Per Child - or per user with a disability

GNOME 2.18, hot off the presses!

See Sun at CSUN

Life imitates art

Thoughts on an interesting interview with Chris Hofstader, formerly of Freedom Scientific

Accessible Open Document Exchange Formats - workshop, conference, and presentation in Berlin