Brand Identity: scorn

Dear SDL / TraDOS

RantWoman is part of two different not heavily overlapping email lists of about 100 blind or visually impaired translators or interpreters based worldwide. Most of us are part of various networks of teachers and other language professionals. We would LOVE to be able to use our screen readers to interact with your technology. We would LOVE to be able to say to blind colleagues considering translation as a profession that the industry-leading tools are accessible.

RantWoman thanks a sales rep she spoke to once at a conference several years and a couple versions ago for at least listening respectfully. RantWoman understands some brutal cost and revenue concerns on both sides. Still, RantWoman at least would really, really like to be presenting your company in a positive light.

Unfortunately, this week one of the blind interpreter lists has a very detailed list of things that worked fine in TraDOS 2007. Your company won a coveted feature spot on RantWoman's rant list partly because that list of partial functionality got completely obliterated in TraDOS 2009.

Your company aspires to be the market leader in Computer-Aided Translation tools. Our customers want us to be able to interact with your product. We want to be able to interact with your product. RantWoman thinks she would be doing you no favors by pulling punches and being coy about mentioning your brand name and our accessibility concerns.

RantWoman is aware that doing something about accessibility for future upgrades would almost certainly benefit from a good charm offensive. RantWoman's life is already far too rich in opportunities NOT to make money interacting with some esoteric nexus of technology and accessibility needs, and charm is in really short supply. The very best RantWoman can do is to offer some different scenarios for helping your company connect to the right pieces of expertise for a design phase and to others who, RantWoman is just guessing, would be very glad to help beta test.Word!

Thank you very much for acting on these concerns as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

RantWoman