Recently, GW Micro has been touting that Window-Eyes is on top of the world with Vista support coming out the same day that Vista shipped.  We worked long and hard to make this happen.  In fact, over a year ago, there was a porting lab hosted by Microsoft that was designed for AT companies to work closely with the Microsoft development team, so that accessibility issues could be addressed during the Vista development process.  More on that later.

As a company, GW Micro has been proud to be not only a leader in screen reader development, but also an advocate for accessibility.  You can see this in every aspect of our business.  When blind consumers needed access to PDF files, we partnered with Adobe to help make them accessible for the first time ever.  When blind consumers needed access to Macromedia Flash, we helped Macromedia make it accessible.  When blind consumers needed access to Citrix, we were able to help Citrix make their software accessible.  As usual, we took the lead and made the applications accessible by helping their developers understand software accessibility.  These advances in screen reading technology were made possible due to the caring attitude of the people here at GW Micro, and the willingness to make the world a better place for blind individuals regardless of the cost.  At least one of these companies approached one of our competitors, and was asked for thousands and thousands of dollars to help make these applications accessible.  After GW Micro helped these companies make their software accessible for very little or no money at all, our competition was able to piggyback off of our hard work, and implement the technology into their own screen reader.  And, in all honesty, for blind consumers, this is great because they now have access to applications they would never have had access to before – all thanks to GW Micro.

Back to the Microsoft porting lab - it was no exception to the rule.  Various AT companies were invited to join in the same lab.   We sent all but one of our developers to Microsoft for the lab, while one of our competitors sent only a manager, who isn't even a software developer.  While our competition went home in only several days, our developers stayed and continued to work with Microsoft for two weeks.  As usual, they fixed problems in the pre-release versions of Vista that affected not just Window-Eyes, but all screen readers.  And, again, because of our hard work, all screen reader users will benefit, which is great.

This type of commitment is what allowed us to be the first screen reader to support Vista, and, as of today, still the only screen reader to have an official release that works with Vista.  So, I was somewhat saddened today when I saw a competitor of ours attempting to blast everyone when they said, "This is far superior to what the competition is currently able to do."  This was in reference to a Vista feature, which we have already been doing.  

GW Micro is clearly at the top of the game right now.  We've been working extremely hard to make the latest technology accessible, and it is disconcerting at best to see our competitors make erroneous and untrue statements such as this, since GW Micro has done a great majority of the work to make Vista accessible to blind consumers.  I don't even have to defend the technical aspects, because anyone can try both products for themselves and see what happens.  But, when we put as much work into making a new operating system accessible, and then have a competitor send out false statements, I think it just hurts the blind community in general because this isn't creating progress, it creates mistrust.  And, that is certainly not what we need in the blind and visually impaired technology software industry.