I know for certain I could make a set for under 200$.

With duck tape, a camera, a bluetooth adaptor, and coding know-how you could make this for under $100. What a scam.

There are others in this space that are much cheaper, but I still think there is room if you have the skills to put a product together. For anyone reading this, I say go for it, just be sure to bring some users along in your development process to stay on the right track.

I was angry to learn about this sort of thing when I was working on learning braille. I wanted to purchase a braille printer to make braille material for people in my community and found them, even used ones, to be too expensive. Braille typewriters are similarly expensive and the little braille readers are expensive, too, especially for what they are. It's no wonder that so few people who could benefit from braille choose not to learn it and why so many people willing to produce it are not providing additional material to what little is available. A lot of these items are sold exclusively by vendors and not readily available on the market, and these vendors often deal exclusively with agencies rather than individual, making the accessibility products even more difficult to acquire. Add to that the fact that insurance often doesn't pay for accessibility devices unless they are specifically medical devices, if they cover that sort of thing at all.



Part of it has to do with these being niche products with a lower demand point, but that doesn't fully account for the outrageous prices of a lot of these items. Making accessibility products inaccessible to those who need them via outrageous pricing is absurd.



I would like to see something done about this, but, honestly, I don't know what. Just, something that at least improves the situation.

I sat in for a presentation for this thing at the Braille institute in LA a few months ago. Comically high prices are pretty much par for the course for any accessible tech. That being said, I lost all interest because of the presentation. about half of it was the presenter patting orcam on the back and going into the history of how the company got started and how it was automotive tech that got sold off and the people who sold it off got rich. I'm not even joking. The first five minutes was talking about that. He was trying to do some sort of Steve Jobs schtick and in the end I ended up getting more info from all of the questions that people asked, rather than what the presenter told us. After some prodding from the audience that presenter admitted that this was best suited for people with some vision who could point at objects on their own.

their big claim to fame is that they are HIPAA compliant. So I guess if you work with personal info this thing would be nice. The nail that sealed the coffin for me was the fact that they completely blew off Android. I don't give a flying fuck if voiceover is objectively better or not. Accessible tech is supposed to work for the user. You shouldn't have to adapt to the tech beyond learning the controls. the app only has basic control anyway, since no data leaves the device. There's absolutely no reason they couldn't have ported it over to Android.

The presentation gave me the impression that orcam is a company that really doesn't care about their clients. Oh right, apparently the device gets two years of support. You want to charge exorbitant fees for a product? Fine, I get it. Developing it is expensive and the market is small. Maybe don't treat your customers like garbage though. Apple seems like a caring grandparent compared to the toxicity I got in that presentation

Just yesterday I was looking at the Magnilink video magnifiers and the site did not list the prices (which was already a red flag). After googling I found that they started around 2500 bucks. Honestly all it is is a monitor and a good camera + software. I dont get why that is 2500-4100 bucks. You can get a really nice screen for less than 200 bucks nowadays. And a nice HD camera with up to like 50x zoom is still not gonna cost you anything close to 2500. They charge those prices cuz a lot of us are desperate for ways to improve our qualities of life.

Wow. I was thinking the device would be in the low hundreds of dollars. Over $4000? Seriously?

What a ripoff. This isn’t super easy, but it’s not rocket science, either. The BOM on the device can’t be above $200.

WOW. Time to give those companies some competition.

Orcam is ok but for the price, I can buy a knew iphone, put Seeing AI on it for free and still have money left over.