Rush jobs and assistive technology

When did “test” become a bad word among hardware and software companies? The reason I haven’t yet reviewed the Smart Nav pointer is that, while it’s great when it works, it doesn’t work consistently. NaturalPoint has known about a driver issue that causes the device to quit working after hibernation or standby (until you reconnect it, or else stick it in a USB hub which you shouldn’t have to use) for at least two versions. It’s fine if they’re having trouble figuring out the problem — well, not fine fine, but at least understandable — but I don’t like it that they blame the problem on people’s motherboards in their PCs. It is not the damn motherboard, otherwise many hundreds of people got ripped off on their computers. Don’t make people think they have to overhaul their PCs, when what they need to do is wait for you to actually fix the problem. It says on their website that one of their beta driver upgrades fixed a “standby issue,” but it must not have been that one, judging from the support forum. Either that, or the next driver release wiped out the fix somehow.

Then, even though I won’t be able to afford upgrading for some time, I was looking at the newly released Dragon 10. Any new software release is going to have bugs. In fact, Dragon 9.5 still has a few minor annoyances — emphasis, though, on minor. They can be worked around simply by saying something different, and they don’t affect major functions anyway. Judging by the reviews on Dragon 10, though, Nuance released it a bit too quickly. It turns out they had to post a fix on their knowledge base to remedy a problem that prevented the software from even being installed. I’m assuming it worked after that, but I’m wondering how many calls they had to get before they realized it was an issue, not to mention a critical one.

I realize to some extent the programs are always a work in progress. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous post, I e-mailed the makers of Typing Assistant about considering keyboard access to the dialog boxes in future releases, and they sent me a very gracious reply, acknowledging that they were still exploring possibilities and they would consider it. So it’s not that everything has to be perfect, and the inevitable glitches can usually be lived with, but I do think there’s a line between the merely unfinished and the unstable. I think some companies get a little complacent when they have a captive market, which many assistive technology vendors do. Not all of them, of course, and I’m not even sure it’s intentional when it occurs, but it still sucks.