as far as i know there have been improvements? not sure what kind of "revolution" the author wanted but having a medium-form-factor portable computer with the p

as far as i know there have been improvements? not sure what kind of "revolution" the author wanted but having a medium-form-factor portable computer with the power to do stuff like writing recognition (well) and speech synthesis is pretty helpful then again, the hard truth is there's no percentage in accessibility software. not to say no one can make money doing it, but it's basically a bounded market. the driver of improvements will probably be as boomers start aging more: they'll live longer, but at a lower quality of life, so need stuff to help them get by. and it'll be a big enough market to justify serious attention. i think this quote from the guy illustrates his misunderstanding pretty well: "It’s hard to think that non-disabled consumers would be expected to accept the same slow pace of incremental improvement for as essential a human function as speech." see of course it's reasonable to expect that tech for normal people improves faster, it's a massively larger market. "To compensate for the small market size, developers backed into a convoluted business model that required a physician or licensed speech pathologist to formally “prescribe” the device, strategically (and astronomically) priced to subsidize the cost of its development." case in point. stuff made for a small group of people is gonna run pricey, that's to be expected. feels like this guy is mad no one's built a 99 cent app for an ipad so his daughter has that tech easily. i get the frustration, but it's a pretty tiny market so if i'm fred the app builder i'm not about to go out and address that as my first choice. new tech starts off pareto optimal: putting in 20% of the effort to capture 80% of the market. that's also how we iterate faster. i think it's one of those cases where insisting accessibility software be given equal attention at every stage of the technology life cycle would long-term slow things down for everyone, all in the name of some fuzzy principle of equality of outcome.