My cousin's child is quadriplegic with cerebral palsy and a lot of his eye controlled tech runs on Windows
That I control tech exists for every platform, but there is only OS X that you can take out of the box as a quadriplegic and with minimal help from a Designated Pair of Hands™ be up and running and independently messing around on HN.
Believe me, if I could buy a cheap laptop running Windows or Linux preferably and get the same user experience I get from OS X I would do it in a heartbeat. But in the past decade of trying, nothing comes close to OS X at the moment and even then OS X has only been this accessible for the past two or three additions.
All Microsoft did in this instance you're talking about is make sure that the drivers worked, and I trackers are essentially just mice as far as the computer is concerned, all of the clever stuff is done inside the eye tracker itself.
Just my two pence worth. But you know, It's 2 pence that I've earned through a decade of being a quadriplegic geek getting very annoyed at not being able to use my computer like everybody else.
I long for the day that I could use voice dictation software on Linux, any Linux distribution would be fine, then I could switch to some nice open source software and I would be a very happy pussycat. But none exists as far as I'm aware.
Edited to add: for clarity and excuse the odd grammatical mistake, Dragon doesn't make spelling mistakes but it does put the wrong word in the wrong place sometimes.
This is much better for overall scriptability IMHO than AppleScript
Then StickyKeys etc are valiant attempts at a complex area with so many different user types
Pretty much anything used to drive a UI on OS X is going through the accessibility APIs to do so.
So for instance I will have a button on my switch control on-screen keyboard, and when it's pressed it sends a request To If This Than That, which communicates with my LIFX lightbulbs and flashes all of them in the house blue notifying my carer that I need assistance. That's just one of many. I love AppleScript.
To be clear I control my computer with my right index finger which gives me left mouse click, a small reflective doton my glasses which gives the cursor movement and voice dictation software which enables you to leave comments on Hacker News.
On Windows, Autohotkey is my goto for automation
Not just GTK. Qt, Java, Electron-based... on Windows at least, the only way to create a truly screen reader accessible app is to use native controls. And I mean native controls, via the Windows API, not just ones which look native. Qt has some academic accessibility support but it's practically unusable.
Ironically, given the article I'm commenting on, the situation is worse on OS X.
But why does that matter? Well it turns out that many enterprises (both governments and corporations) have requirements that prevent them from purchasing equipment that lacks accessible technologies and that meant that you couldn’t sell computers that didn’t have beep hardware to those enterprises."
Source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2010/01/04/wh... (search for ADA)
To echo your sentiment, Apple devices were far-and-away the easiest to use from an accessibility standpoint, both as a tester, and as a developer.
Anyone else want to give it a try?
I have a feeling that I got lucky. There's another setting under "Keyboard" > "Accessibility", at the bottom, called "Full Keyboard Access". Mine is set to "All controls". I have a feeling yours is set to "Text boxes and lists only", which may be the default.
So I am kinda proving your point here :)
(The non-discoverable way is to press Ctrl-Fn-F7; it's non-discoverable because the only place these instructions are shown is the Keyboard -> Shortcuts tab, but you can't get to that tab without a mouse.)
Very close Apple. Just a little more polish for your next update.
Then when I go to the panel, I tab and it only highlights the left-side of the portion. Confused me at first but after mashing some keys I found that you need to press up/down on the left page to select the "mouse portion" THEN tab again and it will go "into" the place with the mouse keys. Here's a gif http://imgur.com/a/SedKz.
Edit: See nearby replies -- the reason you were able to do this is that you had previously changed a default setting which has no obvious way of being changed without a mouse.
Tim Cook says Apple is the U.S.'s largest taxpayer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/wp/2016/08/13/2016...
If the IRS doesn't do its job because e.g legislators leave loopholes, or are in bed with big corps, then it's up to "commenters on HN" to call both on them. That's what being a citizen is about.
Ireland is accused (and convicted) of giving illegal tax benefits to Apple. Of course they don't like the verdict.
It's crazy people support the EU telling a sovereign country how to tax their citizens.
of course, that's supposedly what they signed up for by joining the EU. it's no wonder countries want to leave it tho. who voluntarily decides to give up their soverignity?
Everyone who chooses not to live in anarchy; it's a very normal and healthy thing to do.
Groups of people cooperate to agree on rules that achieve situations far superior to anarchy, where might makes right and little progress is made. My various levels of localities "give up" sovereignty to national government, which "gives up" sovereignty to international institutions. My person "gives up" sovereignty to all of the above. That way we can coordinate things on a local, national, and international scale as needed, from taxes to trade to health care to nuclear disarmament.
In this case, Europeans felt the need to agree on rules to prevent a race to the bottom in tax benefits to corporations. Everyone benefits by following these rules.
But perhaps they should still be paying more - but that's a discussion for another time.
Assuming you're from the US, every year you have the choice to take the standard deduction or itemize. Do you ever feel guilty for choosing the option that lessens your tax burden? Why would you hold a company to a higher standard?
If you think that companies should pay more taxes, then push your government to close the loopholes they're using and/or raise taxes. If you're counting on people to 'do the right thing' when they're directly incentivized not to you're going get nothing but disappointment.
You're talking about incentives which is a different discussion. There are incentives that go the other way too: evading taxes looks bad, it's bad for business if society crumbles for lack of revenue, morally it's wrong to benefit from infrastructure, education, etc and not contribute back. But that's not the point I was addressing.
If I owned a company overpaying taxes I'd seek to have them acquired (priced using a tax-efficient income assumption) or management replaced. Suing would be unlikely.
That said, I agree with your general point that no fiduciary obligation is likely violated. It's just bad business.
What you're proposing is referred to as 'Social Darwinism'. In this application it is used in a pseudo-logical fashion to beg the question entirely and falsely imply the justification of a lemma.
Your argument is as follows. "If you believe in (1) [natural selection applied to companies], then (2) [causal hypothesis: '1' leads to 'type'], meaning that (3) the [companies of type] we see now are the result of [natural selection applied to companies]."
I hope it is apparent when you look carefully that the 'companies of type' we are seeing now would be simply the result of natural selection in any case, that there is no support for the causal hypothesis presented, and that the causal hypothesis is not in fact a logically necessary implication of the original lemma.
The reason that this might feel meaningful, rather than be at first glance a tangle of errors, is that it involves the juncture between a hypothesis for which you feel you have evidence (and do!) with a core belief. Your hypothesis: "companies that do better at minimizing taxes are more likely to survive than those that don't." Your belief: "markets are efficient and the best economy arises when companies are allowed to compete without interference."
The difficulty here is in the confusion of the two intellectual contexts. Natural selection is a descriptive theory about how what is came to be. Market libertarianism is a prescriptive theory about how what should be can come to be. They are not interrelated. Under condition of Soviet Market, natural selection will still exist. Even if regulatory capture helps a company survive instead of perish, libertarian theory still advocates against it.
If you believe in natural selection applied to companies, then what we have here is the natural and almost predictable extinction event of those companies that over-optimized on minimizing taxes.
However, the belief in "natural selection applied to companies" is essentially meaningless once you decouple it from action or advocacy; coupled to advocacy, it is incoherent. It inherits absolutely no scientific justification or intellectual rigour from biology.
Minimizing taxes as a financial optimization strategy have everything to do with competitive advantage. If we were genuinely looking to take lessons from biological history, it would teach us that subsequently perishing as a consequence of that adaptation is entirely natural and normal. 'Natural selection' is whatever happens. It is often conflated with various notions of progress, merit, laissez-faire, et cetera, but seldom honestly.
Selection bias is a real thing, however. For example, "All politicians are corrupt" doesn't mean they all are, but given corrupt as a competitive advantage, the ones that weren't corrupt are not successful enough to be known. You don't have to be corrupt to be a politician, but you might have to to be a successful one. Businesses are much more like that given hyper competitive environments.
There really isn't another company in the world, certainly not another phone Manufacturer that has thought of people with motor skill problems in the way that Apple has. When people think of accessibility they think of the blind and that deaf, people with motor function problems are definitely the red-headed stepchildren of the accessibility software world.
Apple, pay your fng taxes but thank you very very very much for the accessibility software, my life would be much much poorer intellectually without it.