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It’s been a rejuvenating break, and that means I’m delighted to be back in the studio putting together more Living Blindfully episodes for you. I hope you had a good break and that 2024 has started well for you.
On the show this week, in recent years, some organisations providing services to the blind and those with low vision have changed their names. Some of those name changes have completely erased the word blind and use words like vision or sight, which is precisely the opposite of what they really do. So this week, I’ll contemplate what a confusing world we would live in if businesses in other parts of society inflicted the same confusion on their customers. One thing I can assure you of though, Living Blindfully is the podcast where blind is fine. Don’t expect us to change our name to the Visionary Podcast any time soon.
I’m delighted to welcome Ryan Jones, Vice President of Software Product Management at Vispero. To its great credit, Freedom Scientific/Vispero has its own media, including podcasts. But an independent podcast like this one can ask different, and perhaps tougher, questions. We’ll do a deep dive into the state of JAWS at the moment, areas where NVDA have the edge, the ongoing value proposition for JAWS as Narrator and NVDA become more capable, why there is ongoing inequity between the licensing options in North America versus the rest of the world, and much more.
In a move that I don’t think anyone predicted, Level Access, a leading accessibility solutions provider, has announced their intention to buy Userway for $99 million. I have some initial thoughts on this and we hope to cover this story further as it develops.
If you buy a new Windows computer, eventually you’re likely to find a new key on the keyboard, the Copilot key. This could have implications for screen reader users. I’ll fill you in.
And as you’d expect, some new technology has landed at Mosen Towers over the summer, Bonnie and I will discuss it.
All this and more coming up on this week’s episode of Living Blindfully.