thanks for your comment (and sorry for the delay in answering – been too busy for anything over the last few weeks).

I appreciate you clarifying a few of the points and I am sorry if I sounded harsh. I am not blaming anyone working for Widgit directly and appreciate that you all are getting a lower than industry rate pay for your work. My problem is with the pricing issue overall. The fact that non-profit organisations are given a lower rate is very good but does not really solve the problem as this again would limit access to websites overall for our target group, restricting them to sites of the non-profit organisations alone.

I might be naive and not realise the full business implications but I do find it hard to believe that this cannot be solved in any other way. Having learnt so much from the internet and the spirit of sharing knowledge online myself – I do think developing assisitive imagery such as your symbols could be done by the open source community, for example, making them available for free to those in need. I know that I myself would be happy to give some of my time to such a project – and I’m convinved I would not be alone.

You say that you are working on “tools that actually improve these people’s lives”. Yes, looking at it from a purely theoretical point of view – I agree. But in reality, practically speaking, how many people do actually benefit if the cost alone will need to be carried by the website owner (who might not be willing to pay for this) as well as the end user who simply might not be able to afford your browser fee?

I would argue that your tool then will only benefit people who are already being looked after and cared for – but exclude all those in different situations, trying to live more independent lives.

Simon, I am not criticising Widgit alone here. To me – the INMD workshop highlighted the fact how little is being done – or how poor the quality of work is – to support people with intellectual disabilities, and not even that alone – but disabled users overall. I was shocked to see how poor the design and code was on so many sites which claim to be accessible to all users – or even specifically designed for users with any form of disability. The fact that there are symbols being developed to improve this situation is great in principle – but in praxis this just does not seem to be right as through the pricing alone their use is very restricted and limited to a small group within a much larger target group.

I’m disappointed that you feel like that.

One thing you haven’t pointed out is that we discussed the fact that Widgit has very different rates for non-profit organisations, which are an order of magnitude lower. We also discussed the fact that Widgit provide a degree of fair-use copyright allowance, so that anyone who has purchased a copy of our software can do a reasonable amount of stuff with the symbols, before we charge for a royalty.

You also mention the fact that development costs have to be covered, but I suspect you don’t realise just how much it costs. We’ve had a team of 12 people working for three years on our symbolisation technology, and you can probably do some maths to extrapolate just how much that costs. – We all take significantly lower than industry-average salaries becase we find reward in what we do, which is helping people. Widgit makes a modest profit, nearly all of which is invested back into the business to fund further research, and we endeavour to keep costs as low as we can, in order to help out the people who need our software.

We simply could not do the work that we do with government or charitable funding. We would like to, but there is simply not enough funding available to do the kind of work that we do. It’s very expensive.

Makaton are a charity, and they still charge for their symbols. Mayer-Johnson also charge for their PCS symbols. People charge for screen readers, wheelchairs, AAC devices, text predictors, and so on. There is government funding available for the purchase of such items, but the companies that produce them do not give them away.

The figure of £2,500 (quoted off the top of my head) concerns the bandwidth that a site as large as Curry’s would consume in using our symbols, as well as a year’s usage of a very CPU-intensive web service. We’ve looked into these kind of figures and by the time we’ve paid our datacenter bills there’s not a great deal left over from that. And that’s before you factor in the time taken for the expert technical support required in supporting something as complex as an API.

I agree completely that it’s a great disappointment that symbol users cannot get free access to the symbols and software that they need. It’s a shame that there isn’t enough government money to either subsidise the purchase, or pay for the development. But please don’t blame the people who work hard and make significant personal sacrifices trying to produce the tools that actually improve these people’s lives, when they could all be working somewhere else for twice their salaries.

Regards,
Simon