I don't understand the appeal of the BT-speak. I've seen reviews about it and it just sounds like an old computer and not something mainstream. What's the big deal? #Blind
it's a throwback to something a similar size to the BRAILLE 'N SPEAK, which helped perhaps thousands of people in academia and professional jobs in its hayday.
@techsinger oe sure, it has to do a decent job. The expectations of blind people have changed over the decades too. People use technology very differently now after all. I'm not sure I'd get any milage out of a device that wasn't online - but since my phone has Braille screen input, I'm as fast typing here as I would be on a tactile keyboard. So then for me it becomes a case of useful apps. iOS has a perfectly fine calendar, email client, clock and timer system built in. I have a text and audio notetaker, access to the web and social media, and my books and GPS on here. I can't think what I'd need an external device for. I might like a decent braille calculator maybe, but apart from that I've seen nothing in the blind microcomputer market for me yet.
@cachondo Makes sense. There is one thing I would raise, though. I agree about most iPhone basic apps being more or less usable, perfectly fine, if not better than that. Thing is, I want absolute excellence, I don't want to do workarounds, I want something that gets out of the way and lets me work as fast and as thoughtlessly as possible. My favourite examples of this are Tweesecake and QRead. Both are specifically blindness products, both have fewer features than the mainstream products, both have their problems. I use both because all I want is efficiency. Other programs will work to do the same things, but they're not as fast and don't use the same UI stuff I'm used to and like. That's why I would buy a BT Speak, if I ever do. BTW, for that price, it can't do a decent job, it has to be a nearly perfect job.
@techsinger If you're looking for absolute excellence, though, surely that's quite a subjective experience? How open is the BTSpeak to modification and customisation? One of the really cool things about a product like NVDA, for example, is the number of amazing addons it has. It can do so much more than its core feature set because of other people.
A bad example of this is something like the Braillenote, which is still being sold at a very high price point, despite running on an outdated OS and not even doing what it's meant to particularly well.
@cachondo I'm sorry. If I came off as saying that all blindness products were excellent... I really can't think of anything I disagree with more, I must have completely made a mess of what I was saying if that's what I implied. In general, I think blindness products are of lower, mostly vastly lower, quality than those for the sighted user. I think that most products blind people use, and which were originally designed for the sighted, are actually better than products designed for the blind specifically. What I was responding to was your statement that the BTSpeak had to do a decent job. I was saying that it doesn't have to do a decent job, it has to do an absolutely excellent job, both to justify its price and to justify itself as being for the blind and not mainstream, lacking all the benefits of mainstream tech. That's what I mean there. As for excellence, I think most of it is objective, actually. When I talk to people about what's wrong and what's right, I often find people who mention the same things I do about the same products. Does the product crash allot, can it be customized, does it have to be sent back for repair often, does it get out of the way and let you work once you've set it up, does it work with the paradigms we're used to... All these things, except maybe the last, are objective, and I've seen them come up in both AT and mainstream stuff. It's hard, but not impossible.
It's not old, it's based on a Raspberry pi 5. It is made with lots of off-the-shelf components, so that's cool. It's more expensive thant I would like, but they've done all the design work for you. It works with a braille keyboard. You can run Linux programs and stuff. It's kind of cool, if you're not the kind of person who wants to do DIY all the time.
@mcourcel Just to add, I think @gocu54 is saying that old is a bad thing and new is a good thing. If that's what's being said, and as respectfully as possible, that's simply false. I'm not sure about most things but it's simply not true when it comes to tech. If you think I'm wrong, I would appreciate correction, I can think of a ton of new products which are objectively worse than older ones. I can think of a bunch of products, of course, which got better as they became newer, but there's a good argument that it's not even the norm anymore. It was never universal.
@techsinger @mcourcel The BT Speak uses a Raspberry PI CM4. It has a mode called traditional mode with an editor as well as many other applications but its desktop mode is an accessible GUI using Orca. It provides modern applications, such as Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. www.BlazieTech.com #BTSpeak
Sean Randall
in reply to Nick's world 🌎 👨🦯 • • •Tech Singer
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Tech Singer • • •Tech Singer
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Tech Singer • • •@techsinger If you're looking for absolute excellence, though, surely that's quite a subjective experience?
How open is the BTSpeak to modification and customisation?
One of the really cool things about a product like NVDA, for example, is the number of amazing addons it has. It can do so much more than its core feature set because of other people.
A bad example of this is something like the Braillenote, which is still being sold at a very high price point, despite running on an outdated OS and not even doing what it's meant to particularly well.
Nick's world 🌎 👨🦯
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Tech Singer
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Martin from Toronto
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in reply to Martin from Toronto • • •Nick's world 🌎 👨🦯
in reply to Tech Singer • • •Tech Singer
in reply to Nick's world 🌎 👨🦯 • • •Nick's world 🌎 👨🦯
in reply to Tech Singer • • •David Goldfield
in reply to Nick's world 🌎 👨🦯 • • •www.BlazieTech.com
#BTSpeak
Darrell Bowles
in reply to David Goldfield • • •Darrell Bowles
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