then again, the hard truth is there's no percentage in accessibility software. not to say no one can make money doing it, but it's basically a bounded market. the driver of improvements will probably be as boomers start aging more: they'll live longer, but at a lower quality of life, so need stuff to help them get by. and it'll be a big enough market to justify serious attention.
i think this quote from the guy illustrates his misunderstanding pretty well: "It’s hard to think that non-disabled consumers would be expected to accept the same slow pace of incremental improvement for as essential a human function as speech." see of course it's reasonable to expect that tech for normal people improves faster, it's a massively larger market.
"To compensate for the small market size, developers backed into a convoluted business model that required a physician or licensed speech pathologist to formally “prescribe” the device, strategically (and astronomically) priced to subsidize the cost of its development." case in point. stuff made for a small group of people is gonna run pricey, that's to be expected. feels like this guy is mad no one's built a 99 cent app for an ipad so his daughter has that tech easily. i get the frustration, but it's a pretty tiny market so if i'm fred the app builder i'm not about to go out and address that as my first choice.
new tech starts off pareto optimal: putting in 20% of the effort to capture 80% of the market. that's also how we iterate faster. i think it's one of those cases where insisting accessibility software be given equal attention at every stage of the technology life cycle would long-term slow things down for everyone, all in the name of some fuzzy principle of equality of outcome.