The freedom of users of accessibility software is more important than ever.
Blind people in my family rely on proprietary software for dealing with visual impairments. It's painful and offensive how exploitative these tools often are. The thought of installing something by a similar company into one's body is frankly dystopian.
The problem right now is that there's a financial incentive for software to remain proprietary. As a user, you get to pick between "no help" or "proprietary help".
I would gladly pay big money for proprietary tools if it means regaining some of my sight until libre options exist. Looking at the rather sorry state of accessibility on libre software, I'll be dead and buried before the first digital eyeball with free software comes out.
In the US you'd have to get any implanted solution past the FDA, which is going to require a decent amount of money and probably a QA engineer and someone responsible for reading the regulatory documents and articulating their requirements for the team and the QA engineer.
As a citizen of a country with free healthcare, Sweden, I wonder how we deal with these issues. We dont exactly have a stellar record when it comes to software procurement in the health sector.
